The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon - Romano Lamperti

Photo cover credits: Photo by NASA on Unsplash

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon Romano Lamperti

To my dear brother Franco, a source of comfort during difficult times and now a light from heaven

Contents

9

INTRODUCTION

Twenty-five years is a quarter of geotechnical instrumentation’s history.

During this time, Sisgeo’s managers and the innovation and continuous attention of its technicians have turned the company into one of the world leaders in construction and geotechnical engineering instrumentation applications. In 25 years, Sisgeo has grown from just one among many industry competitors to a key player in the global monitoring business.

All this was made possible by the company’s expertise and genuine passion, as can be seen in the story told in this book.

We need to turn back to the late 1930s, to discover geotechnics’ history – when the need first arose to measure and quantify the behaviour of infrastructure works, verify the resulting procedures and evaluate the calculation hypotheses. Geotechnics, which involves works and soil measurement, first appeared when the scientific method, rooted in the experimental verification of theories, became current practice.

Between the forties and sixties, a variety of optical, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic and electric low-voltage instruments were designed, built and offered to engineers. They provided a mass of, sometimes inaccurate, data. But the installation difficulties, reading complexity and fragility of these instruments quickly became evident, as did their excessively short life span compared to the continuous need to monitor soil and works. Many of these instruments were extremely short lived, but it was undoubtedly a time of great ferment and creativity. I myself had the good fortune of meeting and working with some of the geotechnics pioneers, such as Arthur Casagrande, creator of the piezometer for pore-pressure measurements, and inclinometer creator Stan Wilson.

This reconstruction stems from my direct experience. I remember installing vibrating wire piezometers in 1963 and, in 1970, contributing to the realisation of a vibrating wire inclinometer which could measure the profile of a dam wall, regardless of its inclination. At the time, the readout required a second vibrating wire, whose tension was varied 11

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manually until the frequency of the sensor wire was duplicated. It was a slow operation and highly operator dependent. The next two decades, the seventies and eighties, saw the emergence of inductive (LVDT) and micro-voltage sensors, known as strain gauges, which brought about a new generation of instruments and the measurement of new parameters with higher levels of precision. During this time, I had my first encounter with Sis Geotecnica, for which I later drew up measuring procedures and designed instrumentation systems. In the early eighties, I met Romano Lamperti, who was then a young engineer who had just joined the Sis Geotecnica technical office. Together, we worked out how to improve the instrumentation, developed instrumentation projects, created installation specifications and launched new instruments. Although our collaboration was brief, it was long enough for me to appreciate Romano’s professionalism, versatility and personality, and to build a lasting friendship. I wonder whether his interest in instrumentation began during those hours spent together in the lab. It has become Romano’s passion and life-long interest. Integrated circuits and radar sensors have made it possible, since the nineties, to automate many measurements, have sequential readings, process signals and provide tele-transmission. The advent of modern computers made it possible to store data and obtain previously unthinkable charts and graphical representations. Not all manufacturers understood the benefits or kept abreast of these innovations. In 1993, Domenico Bruzzi founded Sisgeo.

Romano, who by then had mastered the subject, became Bruzzi’s copilot in this new adventure. From the outside, I could follow Sisgeo’s surprising and laudable growth. This resulted in improved sensors with simplified installation and electronic reading methods; transformed and optimised pre- and post-processing storing; and sturdier, compact and attractive packaging – a broader, more differentiated products list, with clear, comprehensive manuals. As an engineer, I am delighted with the care paid to developing the quality of Sisgeo branded products, and its staff training, upgraded laboratories, improved material quality and attractive product designs. Romano Lamperti’s personality and vision expanded Sisgeo’s market and developed its sales network, which now spans five continents. The recent acquisition of Switzerland’s historical instrumentation company Huggengerger, is an indication of Italian Sisgeo’s prestige and competence, which has seen it equip some of the world’s most important infrastructure works. Sisgeo has become a 12

source of pride, not only for its managers and technicians, but for the whole of Italy, which owes this pocket multinational its leading position among the few manufacturers of geotechnical instrumentation left in the world.

Piero Sembenelli Piero Sembenelli graduated in Civil Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1960. In 1962, he obtained a Master’s Degree in Soil Mechanics from Boston’s MIT, studying under T.W. Lambe and W. Withman. His graduation thesis covered the first measurement of lateral earth pressure (Ko).

He began his career in Milan with Società di Ingegneria Internazionale, designing earth-filled dams in Greece and Paraguay and a rockfill dam with a metal facing in Peru. He also collaborated with G.E. Bertram of Usce and offered technical support to the legal team after the great landslide of Vajont.

He graduated in Soil Engineering from Harvard in 1965, where he studied under A. Casagrande. He then resumed designing dams and supervising their construction: from 1968 to 1971, he was vice director and engineer at the Prado hydro-electric project in Colombia, involving a 90-meter-tall zoned dam with an inclined core.

From 1970 to 1980, he designed the earth-filled and rockfill dams and the diversion dam of Paraná for the hydroelectric plant of Itaipu, then - and for many years afterwards - the largest in the world. In collaboration with A. Casagrande, he drew up a tender bid to stabilise the Leaning Tower of Pisa (1973). He designed the Congo River deviation for the Grand Inga hydroelectric plant and the Yangtze deviation for the Three Gorges Dam in China.

In 1983, he founded an engineering company to pursue his work and expand into the motorway and underground fields. Since 2015, he has designed more than 100 projects for dams in Italy and another 40 countries. More than 30 of these dams are fully operational, including San Roque in the Philippines, a 215-meter-tall dam with a central core (at the time, the sixth tallest in the world), Zarema in Ethiopia, a 150-meter-tall dam with a bituminous core, and Nam Ou 6 in Laos, a 90-meter-tall dam sealed with a PVC membrane on its upstream wall. Between 2007 and 2015, he designed all the earthworks and seven cofferdams for the new Panama Canal.

He has written over 120 publications and has often served as a general reporter and panellist at international congresses in the field of geotechnics and large dams.

He won the Igs Award for his contribution to the use of waterproofing polymeric membranes in dam design and construction.

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CHAPTER

1993

Springtime 1993. Things in Milan had heated up after Pio Albergo

Trivulzio President Mario Chiesa was caught holding a seven million lira backhander almost a year earlier. The money had come from the owner of a small services company which wanted to win a cleaning contract at the retirement home. This discovery, on 17 February 1992, started what was to become the “Tangentopoli” scandal. Magistrates uncovered a perfectly oiled system of backhanders paid by entrepreneurs to politicians to obtain important work contracts. Since then, almost daily, a search warrant was issued, a notice of indictment served or, an arrest made. The system came tumbling down like a house of cards: the Italian economic panorama was reduced to a pile of rubble, with companies folding under the pressure of bribes and ridiculous expenses to please a new politician. The rot ran deep. This was year zero. A time of bewilderment and the time to start over.

“Romano, they’re asking for you on the third floor. It seems to be urgent.”

Romano Lamperti was a young sales manager at Sis Geotecnica, a historic company based in Seggiano di Pioltello, on the outskirts of Milan which specialised in the design, production and marketing of geotechnical instrumentation. Until 1993, 90% of its customers were the big names behind Italy’s major infrastructure works. There wasn’t a dam, bridge, motorway or railway network that was not equipped with instruments to monitor control soil erosion. Romano climbed to the third floor of Sis Geotecnica, a company which was on the verge of bankruptcy because all its customers - Italy’s major construction companies - had been scorched by Tangentopoli. Entrepreneurs had been jailed, others investigated, and some even took their own lives.

There was no one left to pay its debts, and small-scale suppliers were paying the price. “Romano, it’s time to start over. Just the three of us. Are you in?” The other two were Cesare Colombo, then president and deus ex machina of Sis Geotecnica, and Domenico Bruzzi, a geologist with an 15

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inventor’s flair, who had waged war on Sis Geotecnica for decades, but now, much to his chagrin, was its CEO. But let us take a step back.

Segrate, springtime 1974. Domenico Bruzzi was a young geologist working for Radaelli Castellotti, Rc, a historic company that dealt with geognosy and perforations, and was involved in the Porto Tolle thermoelectric power plant construction, at the River Po delta. This was Bruzzi’s first job, which, as luck would have it, coincided with the birth of Sis Geotecnica (Società Italiana Strumentazione Geotecnica, or Italy’s Geotechnical Instrumentation Company).

In many ways, Sis Geotecnica was born precisely to supply and provide assistance with geotechnical monitoring in Porto Tolle. It was based on an idea by Michele Jamiolkowski, a rising star of Italian geotechnics and founder of the prestigious Studio Geotecnico Italiano. Jamiolkowski could boast more than 8,500 infrastructure consultancy projects with major industrial, public and private groups in Italy and abroad.

Jamiolkowski managed to convince Italy’s main industry players to pool their forces and give life to a company capable of supplying the services required for an important project such as the Porto Tolle power plant.

The result was Sis Geotecnica, with Radaelli Castellotti as its majority shareholder and Domenico Bruzzi as head of the Po delta construction site. Given his youth, he was initially supported by Elmo di Biagio from the Norwegian Geothecnical Institute (NGI) which was the beating heart of worldwide geotechnics. Elmo di Biagio was an American who migrated to Oslo, and one of the world’s greatest geotechnical monitoring experts.

This was Bruzzi’s big break. The Porto Tolle plant was the most important construction work in Italy at the time. In addition to being good training, it allowed Bruzzi to meet industry professionals and demonstrate his skills. So much so that when Radaelli Castellotti acquired cutting-edge equipment for on-site soil testing - a static penetrometer with an electric cone, capable of providing instant x-rays of the soil - it was Bruzzi who handled it, working alongside Jamiolkowski. The measuring equipment was produced by the Hamburg-based Maihak, but the service was poor, and the idea was to build a similar instrument in Italy. In the meantime, Radaelli Castellotti sold this innovative equipment to a new company, called Geosystem, in which Jamiolkowski, with his Studio Geotecnico Italiano, and Bruzzi acquired a minority stake. With the support of Sis Geotecnica, Geosystem developed new measuring equipment for electric cone penetration tests. Sadly, the collaboration between 16

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Geosystem and Sis Geotecnica failed, and when Bruzzi decided to leave the company, Jamiolkowski introduced him to ISMES, the Models and Structures Experimental Institute of Bergamo, to which he currently provides scientific consultancy services.

ISMES was one of the scientific and technical research centres, recognised internationally and working for Enel in the civil engineering field. It included mathematics, geophysics, rock mechanics, electronics, and static and dynamic structural engineering departments, and could count on state-of-the-art instrumentation such as vibration-based monitoring for dynamic evaluation of industrial components and seismic evaluation of civil structures. Such equipment was extremely rare in Europe. With Roberto Riccioni at the helm, the ISMES set out to develop the geotechnical sector, and Bruzzi was offered an opportunity to create an on-site testing and monitoring department. He accepted and, with a generous budget at its disposal, the department quickly took shape.

In 1984, ISMES offered Enel land site characterisation and geotechnical monitoring services for the construction of new nuclear power stations in Italy which formed part of the National Energy Strategy.

In the meantime, Cesare Colombo had become a driving force in Sis Geotecnica, and continued to spur the company on throughout the 1980s, until its capitulation in 1993. The charismatic Colombo was a man of his time and was aware of the lobbying that went on in the halls of power and the Cassa del Mezzogiorno (a public effort by Italy’s government to stimulate economic growth in the country’s less developed southern regions). In those years, exploiting Colombo’s experience within the CISE (Centro Informazioni Studi ed Esperienze) research institute which, like ISMES, was owned by Enel - Sis Geotecnica patented the DAG-10 and DAG-100 level meters designed to measure differential subsidence in large infrastructure works, for use in nuclear power station monitoring. This invention allowed Sis Geotecnica to collaborate with ISMES and take a lead role with Enel, supplying the instrumentation for the Caorso nuclear plant.

Sis Geotecnica and ISMES were neck and neck in the race for nuclear energy contracts and, rather than competing against one another, they chose to collaborate. Joining forces proved a winning strategy in other areas too. For example, after the 1986 landslide in Valtellina, ISMES offered the Civil Protection Department complete support in its investigations, monitoring and alerting services, while Sis Geotecnica 17

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provided the necessary equipment. This time, Sis used ISMES’ technology leadership and Colombo’s remarkable sales skills to expand.

In 1982, Colombo recruited the young Romano Lamperti, a graduate in Civil Engineering with a strong sales acumen, and entrusted his technical training to the engineer Piero Sembenelli, a consultant at Sis Geotecnica with a career as Head Engineer at the Geotechnics Division of Elettroconsult. Elettroconsult is a historic Milan-based engineering company with worldwide projects studying, designing and supervising the construction of dams, hydraulic systems, and hydroelectric/ multifunctional facilities. Lamperti soon learnt the tricks of the trade, and in his late twenties rose to the head of the sales department of Sis Geotecnica. Despite his efforts, he failed to rise to the company’s upper echelons. In 1987, he decided to leave Sis Geotecnica and go into business with an old friend, with whom he opened an estate agency, capitalising on a small legacy left by his father. At the time, the property market was booming. Lamperti rode the wave and seemed to have said farewell to geotechnics and to Sis Geotecnica, where, in the meantime, Bruzzi had made an appearance. The gifted geologist struck up a close friendship with Colombo, and in 1991 decided to leave ISMES to join Sis Geotecnica as CEO. Bruzzi and Colombo worked to bring Lamperti back on board, and succeed after several months of courtship and after making an offer too good to be refused, both professionally and economically.

Meanwhile, the Italian market had grown exponentially. Great motorways and railway lines had been built, as well as dams in the South, such as the Menta River dam on the Aspromonte mountain massif. During this time, engineer Pietro Lunardi, later to become Minister for Infrastructure during Berlusconi’s second and third administrations, was working on post-flood reconstruction in Valtellina as part of the emergency plan devised by the Goria Government. Lunardi, who worked for the engineering firm Rocksoil, designed major underground infrastructure works for motorways, subways, railways and high-speed lines.

Bruzzi soon realised that, with the consolidated practice of lobbying and granting favours typical for those years, Sis Geotecnica had taken on inefficient and overpaid staff. He realised that the company’s accounts were spiralling out of control, and Colombo’s management was leading the company dangerously close to collapse. And right enough, this future was right around the corner. Bruzzi and Lamperti tried to change tack and restore order to the company’s organisation and management.

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Chapter 1 - 1993

They drew up a set of Rules, a quality management manual that defined the company’s operation methods and principles. Bruzzi’s intention of regulating the internal processes and work procedures using the Rules was fully implemented with the achievement of the ISO 9001 Quality Certification. Sis Geotecnica was the first company in its industry to obtain this certification, thanks to the help of Alberto Missaglia, an old friend of Lamperti’s and his rival in countless tennis matches. The certification was awarded in 1997 and issued by the prestigious DNV Det Norske Veritas.

But let us return to the tragic year of 1993, when, facing a colossal financial crisis and a difficult political and economic situation country-wide, the only possible solution for Sis Geotecnica was to call on the state Redundancy Fund to protect its employees, and initiate liquidation proceedings.

To avoid losing momentum, Bruzzi, following the advice of his lawyers and consultants, rented out a branch of Sis Geotecnica so as to start afresh and save the company’s knowledge base. It was the simplest possible solution: a new reduced-scale operation, using part of the offices and laboratories in Seggiano of Pioltello (including their equipment and instruments) and relying on the experience of a dozen staff members retrieved from the Redundancy Fund.

No more overblown salaries: Bruzzi and Lamperti were steeped in debt and could only count on promissory notes to rent the premises of the company they had set out to save. They paid debts with strategic suppliers out of their own pocket, to keep them on in the new company.

All their efforts were in vain. Tangentopoli dealt the final blow, putting the final nail in the coffin of Sis Geotecnica’s accounts. Italy’s greatest ever investigation wiped away all of the company’s customers, leaving it with a bundle of worthless credits. Although Sis Geotecnica was not directly involved in the investigation and no accusation was ever made against it, it had the misfortune of being associated with Italy’s concrete and cement market and with its dams and major infrastructure works.

In Italy, the “system” ensured entrepreneurs easy gains on public tenders; to maintain a position of leadership at the international level, instead, you needed intense efforts and significant investments. In September 1992, all the projects on which Sis Geotecnica was working for large construction companies were interrupted. The companies suddenly stopped placing orders and paying suppliers. In this difficult context, Sis Geotecnica’s financial crisis, generated by a happy-go-lucky 19

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

management, became unbearable. Finally, with a debt of just a few dozen million lire, Sis Geotecnica filed for bankruptcy. The Court-appointed receiver questioned the contract that Bruzzi and Lamperti signed with the liquidator and put everything up for auction. Bruzzi and Lamperti now paid the price of having overpaid for the Sis Geotecnica branch, which they could have had for a song following its bankruptcy. The good news? A new challenge was up for grabs. “Just the three of us. It’s time to start over.”

And the dragon was reborn, under the name of Sisgeo. It was the 12th of March 1993.

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CHAPTER

SUITCASE IN HAND

«So, Romano, are you in?”. Lamperti always loved a challenge, and

this one promised to be complex. “I’m in.” Lamperti replied without hesitation, and signed a marriage covenant with an unfamiliar spouse by the name of Sisgeo. Lamperti and Bruzzi took as their benchmark the product portfolio of the American Slope Indicator, which was at the time the world leader and undisputed point of reference for companies producing geotechnical instruments. Drawing inspiration from these products, they threw down the gauntlet to the most reputed European and overseas manufacturers.

“Sisgeo’s products must be as innovative and reliable as their American counterparts,” said Bruzzi, who instantly shut himself up in the lab and started developing similar products, contacting workshops, drawing up projects and starting production. Meanwhile, Lamperti, as the head of sales, conceived a strategy to find new customers. The only contracts inherited from Sis Geotecnica were those relating to the Czortsztyn and Klimkówka dams in Poland. Anything else had to be created from scratch.

Post 1993 losses were heavy. What was left of the team had been reduced to the bone. There were gaping wounds following the bankruptcy, a range of products largely addressed to the domestic market (where Sis Geotecnica conducted 90% of its business), temporary offices in Seggiano di Pioltello, and a sword of Damocles hanging over the company: namely, a contract to be executed to honour its commitment to the liquidators.

The historical production lines involved inclinometers, piezometers and pressure cells, all of which were useful to control earth-filled dams.

There was also a patent to leverage electro-pneumatiC technology.

Unfortunately, there was no demand abroad, where - unlike in Italy vibrating wire technology was generally used.

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The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

The business idea was to maintain a manufacturing identity, which was not the simplest solution, but in time came to be a wise move. But what technologies should be implemented and what instruments should be manufactured? At the time, America was producing the most cuttingedge technologies using British instrumentation as their benchmark.

There, the market was still buoyant; so much so that the British and Americans had consultants worldwide. Equipment specifications were often dictated by geotechnical luminaries, such as John Burland of the Imperial College, Eric Mikkelsen, Richard Bassett and, especially, John Dunnicliff, whose red book Geotechnical Instrumentation for Monitoring Performance led the way and became the engineering benchmark for establishing the criteria for choosing the right instruments. The red book contained all the major manufacturers – but there was no trace of Sisgeo.

Before embarking on this new journey, Lamperti started scouting. He consulted magazines, read up the literature, wrote letters. He contacted Yorgos Hadyijannelis who worked for Eurotech, an established Greek geotechnical company. Lamperti presented Sisgeo as a new industrial reality seeking to make it on the international scene. Yorgos’s first answer was short and sweet: “We are not directly involved in this sector, which is a whole new field for us. We are in no position to offer guarantees, and don’t have any contracts we can propose at the moment. But we can try to collaborate.” After a few months, the opportunity presented itself: Yorgos and Lamperti joined forces and applied to manufacture and supply monitoring instrumentation for the River Evinos dam which was a key contract in Western Greece. Months of negotiations followed, but endless trips and visits to the site finally earned Sisgeo a new contract.

Lamperti met his new customers and showed them the image of a red dragon, Sisgeo’s new logo. In actual fact, the mythological figure represented a dinosaur, symbolising the geological eras - hence the link with geology; its long neck was a metaphor for the company’s ability to explore the soil in depth.

Lamperti’s first moves were almost improvised. He travelled to different countries, where he tore pages out of the phone book to obtain the addresses and telephone numbers of industry operators potentially interested in becoming Sisgeo distributors. It was painstaking work and didn’t deliver the expected results. He then sought the help of friends with whom he had worked over the years, such as Jean Poirier, whom he had known since his time in Sis Geotecnica. Jean gave 22

Chapter 2 - Suitcase in hand

him the name of Stanko, an engineer from Zagreb, whom Lamperti instantly contacted. Stanko gave him an important Croatian contract at the Brama Peruca dam, where the first automatic data monitoring system was installed. This used Bruzzi’s instrumentation and modules developed by Campbell Scientific, with which Sisgeo began a long and fruitful collaboration. That same dam, of strategic importance for the Balkans, was later bombed during the Croatian war of independence, and in 2010 Sisgeo was involved in its restoration and in upgrading the equipment damaged during the conflict.

At the time, the Italian engineering company ELC Electroconsult, a leader in dam design and construction, was active on the international scene. ELC engineer Piero Sembenelli, who early in his career had taken Lamperti under his wing, had become a leader in his field and headed the design team behind several embankment dams requiring Sisgeo’s competencies. The company won contracts to supply and install instrumentation on the dams designed by ELC, including Sermo on the island of Java in Indonesia and Rio Blanco in the Dominican Republic.

Lamperti and Valesini, a geologist formerly employed by Sis Geotecnica and instantly taken on board by Sisgeo, respectively coordinated the installation and measurement work. At the Sermo dam, the product’s specifications were largely influenced by the British, who had great control in this area. Thus, Sisgeo had to move fast and equip itself with appropriate instruments responding to international standards.

However, Bruzzi had not yet developed purpose-made instruments and so Lamperti turned to Tony Simmonds, sales director and main point of contact at America’s Geokon, who was at this time starting to assert itself as a world leader in the production of quality instrumentation. Lamperti asked Simmonds if he could buy Geokon’s vibrating wire sensors and mount them in Italy and sell them under the Sisgeo brand. Simmonds accepted willingly, as the deal gave the company the chance to explore new markets and set foot in Italy. This was the opportunity Sisgeo had been waiting for. The company could now work on important projects, even though the instrumentation was not exactly the fruit of the Italian dragon’s labour.

Almost by chance, Lamperti made a foray into the Iranian market. A former ISMES executive gave Bruzzi the name of an Iranian, Shahab Attaie, with whom he had done a lot of business some years previously supplying seismic monitoring instruments, and who was now in search 23

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

of alternatives. Lamperti called him and arranged to meet him in post-revolution Teheran. Backed by a great cultural heritage, Iran was building many dams, and Iranian engineers were staunch supporters of instrumentation. Indeed, this formed a significant element of the tender specifications, and the market opened up interesting new scenarios for Sisgeo. Attaie was an Iranian engineer who trained in the United States, where he attended the United States Naval Academy of Annapolis, Maryland, becoming an Officer of the United States Navy.

When the Iran–Iraq War broke out, he returned to his homeland to fight on the front line, and then stayed on to help Persia grow again.

Attaie had considerable experience in the construction of dams, which were sprouting like mushrooms across Iran. “In the nineties, Iran was a country in which freedom, as we understand it, was invisible. We felt constantly observed and spied on. The country had very few, very expensive hotels, no cafés, bars or restaurants, and apparently no luxury or entertainment. But when you entered people’s homes, the women, usually strictly clad in black, turned out to be blondes with make-up and western clothing, serving French wine and Scotch whisky. I was shocked, intrigued and attracted by all this,” recalls Lamperti, who returned to Iran repeatably after winning the tender for the Karun-3 dam – a veritable milestone for Sisgeo.

Karun-3 was Sisgeo’s number one Iranian project and the first in a series of cascade dams on the Karun River, on the Zard-Kuh mountains in the Zagros Range, separating Iran from Iraq. Inside the dam’s diversion tunnels, Sisgeo installed anchor load cells to measure the supporting structures’ tension. The Iranian contract allowed Bruzzi to design the first significant batch of hydraulic instruments manufactured entirely by the Italian Sisgeo, which in the meantime had moved to Segrate, to devote more space to its growing production needs. Over 20 years, Sisgeo provided Iran with the instruments to build more than 40 dams, becoming an undisputed market leader due to the limitations on Americans and Canadians imposed by the embargo. The projects were executed in partnership with SadAfzar, Attaie’s engineering company, which in the meantime has grown both in size and skill, becoming the absolute point of reference in dam monitoring. This allowed Sisgeo to make a name for himself in Iran and, in 2007, even to supply instrumentation to the Imam Reza shrine. The city of Mashhad, in the province of Khorasan, is the leading holy city of Iran, being home 24

Chapter 2 - Suitcase in hand

to the religious complex erected in memory of Imam Reza. The eighth and most important Shiite Imam, he was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and was buried in Mashhad in 817. The complex is open around the clock and welcomes millions of pilgrims every year. It is also a cemetery, where thousands of Muslims have been buried in the last few years.

Managing and maintaining the religious complex was the responsibility of Astana Ghoods, an organisation financed exclusively by donations.

The complex contains Imam Reza’s mausoleum, a masonry structure housing the tomb of the eighth Shiite Imam. The tomb is surmounted by a Golden Dome that measures roughly 12 meters in diameter and 22 meters in height, and is supported by eight arches and as many brick columns that rest on calcareous soil. The need to monitor the Imam’s mausoleum and the Golden Dome was due to its daily deterioration caused by vibrations, traffic and erosion of its foundations. Sisgeo, in cooperation with the University of Tehran, supplied an automatic monitoring system to replace manual readings and ensure measurement continuity.

On the border with Iran, Turkey was another market of great interest for Sisgeo. One of Italy’s most established construction companies abroad was Astaldi, which boasted a sound operating base and an excellent Turkish portfolio. In 1996, Astaldi won the contract for the construction of the Anatolian Motorway connecting Istanbul and Ankara. The project involved digging several galleries in a geologically complex area. The motorway gallery that Astaldi had to dig under Mount Bolu crossed the North Anatolian Fault, which made excavation particularly delicate and monitoring essential. The engineers opted for the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM), which used clearly defined and systematic monitoring. It was an excellent opportunity for Sisgeo and Lamperti to offer Astaldi their expertise, providing assistance and supplying and commissioning the necessary instrumentation.

Excavating the Bolu Tunnel proved to be more complicated than expected. In addition to the geological conditions, the distance between the top of the tunnel and the mountain surface caused difficulties. The enormous mass of soil caused high loads on the supporting structures.

There was a high risk of the project failing due to the pressure generated by the aquifers present in the subsoil. The tunnelling method selected was unsuited to these conditions and worked against Astaldi, which 25

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

found it almost impossible to dig. The company decided to monitor the excavation using further instrumentation and contacted Sisgeo for supplementary sensors to monitor the Bolu Tunnel’s soil erosion. Sisgeo supplied instruments to verify that the stress-strain behaviour of the soil did not exceed certain thresholds, preventing collapse and allowing ongoing design adaptations. The pressure measured by the piezometers installed at excavation level detected a water pressure in the soil of up to 20 bar, which was too high to ensure gallery impermeability and to dig safely. Astaldi was forced to double the centring, the iron arcs supporting the structures, which were inserted before the final concrete casting. Astaldi’s supplementary inspections and Sisgeo’s skills enabled the necessary design corrections and made it possible to complete the gallery – with significant difficulties and delays, but in complete safety.

In 1985, in a Teg gallery under construction in southern Turkey, things had gone differently: there had been two collapses, fortunately without the loss of human lives.

Between 1995 and 1998, Sisgeo’s red dragon arrived in Colombia, once again with Astaldi. Here, in collaboration with other three Italian enterprises (Recchi, CMC and Federici), the construction company won the construction contract for an important hydroelectric plant: the Porce II dam on the Cordillera, north of Medellin. Lamperti shuttled between Milan and the Medellin airport - an arduous journey because the area was patrolled by FARC guerrilla forces, and travelling by car between the city of Medellin and the site was anything but safe. In 1996, a site manager was kidnapped by an armed gang. The Italians always travelled with guards, and when the streets were particularly unsafe or unfit for use, they reach the site by helicopter.

The engineers used Geokon specifications, and it was not easy to have Italian products accepted in a country where American influence was so strong and where only Geokon or Slope Indicator instruments were known. Despite the local hostility and the difficulties encountered by the Italian firms that won the contract, Sisgeo managed to get a foot in the door and to be appreciated in a country where it soon grew roots. It installed its own instruments on galleries along the road connecting the capital and Villavicencio, south of Bogota. Once again, the trips were truly adventurous, both by car or by plane, given that 95% of the passengers on domestic flights were guapos travelling to the country’s coca plantations, where they worked for a few dollars, 26

Chapter 2 - Suitcase in hand

collecting what would elsewhere become white powder. Over the years, Colombia became a stable democracy, allowing Sisgeo to choose it as its operational base, setting up a branch in Bogota. The same cannot be said for Venezuela, where the rise of Hugo Chavez caused the Italian companies to flee, despite having contributed to the development of the country’s infrastructure.

In Europe, the collaboration with the Greek Yorgos was ongoing and expanded from Greek dams to contracts for the Mujib and Wala dams in Jordan, entrusted to Greek construction companies. Lamperti did not just supply the instrumentation to monitor the dams. At Yorgos’ request, he contacted Mahmoud Fardous, the Jordanian engineer responsible for monitoring one of these dams on the company’s behalf. Lamperti and Fardous instantly hit it off. Sometime after construction work on the dam was complete, Lamperti received a phone call from Fardous, informing him of an appealing job offer from a major Saudi Arabian company. Fardous was unsure whether to accept and asked his Italian friend for advice. Lamperti saw that, while uncertain, his friend was also attracted by the idea, and so he encouraged him to accept, offering him the opportunity to become Sisgeo’s Saudi Arabian distributor. This was a new and very rich market waiting to be explored. Fardous accepted and a few months later Lamperti travelled to Riyadh to sign a collaboration agreement with the important Shib Al-Jazira group, for which Fardous worked.

Over the years, Sisgeo provided the Arab country with instruments to monitor several dams, as well as monitoring systems for the large hydraulic infrastructure works in Jeddah and instruments for expansion works at Mecca. An entire city was being enlarged, and the construction works had been contracted out to the Bin Laden group, which in 2015 ended up in disgrace following the collapse of a crane close to the religious centre of Mecca. It was an event that local politicians and religious leaders referred to as a “message from God”, and put an end to the powerful Arab multinational founded by billionaire Mohammed Bin Laden, father of Osama.

27

CHAPTER

BACK TO ITALY AT HIGH SPEED

Sisgeo was churning out projects worldwide, without losing sight of

the opportunities that were starting to emerge at home. The biggest deal involved the construction of the high-speed and high-capacity railway network that nowadays allows the Frecciarossa and Italo lines to connect Milan and Rome in less than three hours.

The first section of the Italian side of the project was the stretch between Naples and Rome, but it was with the Terzo Valico dei Giovi, on the Milan–Genoa lines, that Sisgeo finally got a piece of the action. The project kicked off in the 1990s, when Sisgeo obtained a major assignment from Tecnimont, the technology procurement centre managing tenders for the general contractors of the COCIV consortium, comprising Impregilo (lead company), Società Italiana Condotte d’Acqua and CIV. The invitation to tender issued by Tecnimont and won by Sisgeo covered monitoring the exploratory tunnels dug perpendicularly to the tunnel through which the trains would run, to monitor rock behaviour. These exploratory tunnels were wider than normal, so that they could be used as access and evacuation points during an emergency. Sisgeo produced all the instrumentation for monitoring the tunnels. The work was similar to the Bolu Tunnel project in Turkey, so the dragon knew the ropes.

The works were designed by Rocksoil ‘s Pietro Lunardi. His company had promoted and trained Italian customers on the importance of continuous monitoring and of adopting effective equipment, especially during the excavation phase, to avoid structural subsidence during construction. Sisgeo collaborated frequently with tunnel expert Lunardi, who developed the ADECO-RS method as an alternative to the Austrian NATM, used unsuccessfully in Turkey and on other occasions. ADECORS is a design approach centred on deformation in rocks and soils during

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The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

the excavation phase, measuring and analysing faults through the effective use of equipment. This makes it possible to adapt the design to avoid potentially fatal construction errors. The vast majority of tunnels built since the 1990s were fitted with monitoring instruments, many of which were produced by Sisgeo.

The Milan-Genoa high-speed line was a particularly important contract for Sisgeo as it allowed the company to both supply and install its instrumentation. This required on-site collaboration between its personnel and the general contractors, the construction supervisors and the railway executives. The company decided to strengthen its on-site technical assistance and develop a new business model to integrate and complement its manufacturing business. Field Srl was founded in 2000 - within the context of testing and services – to provide assistance with instrument installation, monitoring and data management. Trained personnel was recruited – mostly geologists and qualified technicians.

Field was Sisgeo’s property. It was run by geologist Paolo Valesini and

by Giorgio Pezzetti, a former engineer at ISMES who had worked with Bruzzi on setting up the institute’s geotechnical department. Having direct feedback on how Sisgeo’s instrumentation worked on-site allowed Bruzzi to improve the company’s designs and was an excellent opportunity for technological growth.

Work on the Milan-Genoa line was interrupted in February 1998 by an order of the Ministry of the Environment and Territory. Lega Ambiente and WWF disputed the usefulness and the extent of the excavations for the exploratory tunnels. They criticised the excessive environmental impact on the Terzo Valico dei Giovi and obtained the Ministry’s consent to interrupt works on the Terzo Valico, in the Lemme Valley and around Castagnola. From a design standpoint, the tunnels made perfect sense, whereas in environmental terms they risked spoiling the area significantly.

The Milan-Genoa lines was unfinished and, not resumed for 20 years.

Towards the end of the millennium, Italy launched its most ambitious plans for the construction of high-speed railway lines. In the 2000s, Sisgeo supplied monitoring equipment for the Milan-Naples line to a group of major firms pooled together into the CEPAV Uno consortium, which was the general contractor responsible for the construction of the Milan-Bologna high-speed and high-capacity railway line. CEPAV was made up of Snamprogetti, Saipem, Consorzio Cooperative Costruzioni, Pizzarotti, Grandi Lavori Fincosit, Aquater and Cogei.

30

Chapter 3 - Back to Italy at high speed

Once again, Sisgeo was asked, through its Field subsidiary, to help with on-site instrumentation assembly and installation. Field, which had been previously brought on board by the Eni Group company Aquater, defined the conceptual design guidelines for the monitoring system and drew up the as-built drawings. Giorgio Pezzetti stood out for his skills and competences. Sisgeo’s contracts kicked off in 2002, with supplies to Impresa Pizzarotti, and continued until 2009. The only stretch that did not see the dragon’s involvement was the Bologna-Florence line, entrusted by the CAVET consortium to the Neapolitan Strago, a competitor of Sisgeo’s but formerly a distributor of Sis Geotecnica products in Southern Italy.

The contracts on the high-speed Milan-Bologna line allowed Lamperti to establish relations with those in charge of monitoring at Impresa Pizzarotti and at Consorzio Cooperative Costruzioni. This included the geologist Gianfranco Iannaccone at Impresa Pizzarotti and the engineer Vincenzo Caci at Consorzio Cooperative Costruzioni. Lamperti was instantly drawn by their technical competence and their enthusiasm for instrumentation, and they soon became good friends. Once the highspeed railway contracts come to an end, Lamperti convinced them to join Sisgeo, which now had more than thirty employees. After five years in Sisgeo, Iannaccone became Field’s CEO, a role he held for another five years before becoming a partner and director of Sisgeo Latino America.

Caci chose to remain in the company, becoming its sales director in January 2016.

In Italy, the railway contracts kept coming. A few years later, work commenced on the Milan-Turin railway line, which was split into two lots: the first between Turin and Novara and the second between Novara and Milan. Once again, Sisgeo supplied the geotechnical instruments to monitor the embankments, bridges and, especially, the viaducts. Finally, the dragon was asked to fit control sensors on the enormous new high-speed railway station at Bologna Centrale. This highly complex construction was a masterpiece of engineering comprising a large underground atrium measuring around 640 meters in length, 56 in width and 23 in depth, and split into three underground levels through which three high-speed trains would run simultaneously. The equipment supplied by Sisgeo continuously monitored the structure and the surrounding soil during the construction phase, and any buildings above ground level that might be affected by any subsidence caused by the excavation.

The experience gained underground and on railway lines allowed 31

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

Sisgeo to take part in the construction of subways worldwide. The most significant are those of Porto and Lisbon, followed by Taipei, Madrid, Bangkok, Athens, Thessaloniki, Amsterdam, Caracas, Santiago, Doha, Paris, Tel Aviv, Bucharest, Riyadh and new lines in Milan and Rome, in particular the complex C line in Italy’s capital city, which crosses the Roman Forum.

Alessandro Zampieri took care of business in Italy, which to this day accounts for 15% of the company’s turnover: “Overall, between 2007 and 2017, around 10,000 monitoring instruments were installed on the C line, including Omnialog dataloggers (or data acquisition and transmission units), BH-Profile inclinometers mounted in boreholes, and H-level sensors for measuring subsidence. Traditional monitoring was carried out for the two lines currently in use, dug using a tunnel boring machine from Casilina as far as San Giovanni. This was conducted alongside automatic monitoring of tunnel segments using special strain gauges to measure the extent of inclination. On the surface, strings of inclinometers and extensometers measured any movements and soil subsidence”. Zampieri explained that work on the Roman subsoil was particularly complex because the new line ran close to several historical monuments, all of which need to be monitored.

Sisgeo kept a close eye on Rome’s most important monuments, such as the Colosseum, the Basilica of Maxentius, the Aurelian Walls and the Roman Forum. A Technical Scientific Committee (CTS) was set up, comprising a pool of internationally acclaimed University lecturers, to coordinate and supervise the study of problems connected with the Roman subway’s interaction with the city’s historical and artistic heritage. The CTS was chaired by Michele Jamiolkowski, who had also chaired the Leaning Tower of Pisa committee and contributed to the birth of Sis Geotecnica: “The contract on the subway C line was a milestone for Sisgeo as it highlighted the company’s ability to operate in particularly sensitive areas and in historical centres such as Rome, where the density of historical and monumental interferences made the operating environment complex and increased the number of variables to be monitored. Continuous and regular monitoring of major works was becoming an essential means of ensuring operating safety and effective maintenance budgeting”.

A particularly complicated project, which contributed to Sisgeo’s growth, involved the contract for the Amsterdam subway, won between 2001 32

Chapter 3 - Back to Italy at high speed

and 2002. The customer was the French company Soldata, now known as Sixense Soldata. It was a subsidiary of the French giant Vinci, and was one of the industry’s greatest international players. Soldata enlisted the world’s best instrumentation manufacturers to carry out a technical evaluation of the inclinometers available on the market. Months before work started, Soldata decided, unbeknownst to the candidates, to buy inclinometers from the most qualified producers in order to compare them. It instructed the French Laboratoire National d’Essais (LNE) to test the products and provide an independent technical evaluation of their performance. Sisgeo was one of the contenders, and was up against the best-known instrumentation manufacturers: four from American (Applied Geomechanics, Geokon, Rst, Slope Indicator) and four from Europe (Gloetzl, Interfels, Sisgeo, Telemac). The LNE tests on the inclinometers confirmed Sisgeo’s leadership, with the company winning the highest score in the overall technical-financial assessment.

But the contractual conditions were more complicated than expected.

The contract turned into a veritable race against time. Sisgeo had six months to deliver over 1,500 inclinometers and a seven-year warranty, subject to penalties in the event of default. If accidents or malfunctions occurred, it had to replace the inclinometers within 48 hours. At the time, Sisgeo was manufacturing about 300 inclinometers a year and did not have the production facilities to churn out so many products so quickly.

Bruzzi and Lamperti did not lose heart. They signed the contract and got down to work. Bruzzi coordinated the project and planned production.

He dealt with procurement and searched for alternative solutions to streamline assembly, calibration, and sensor performance. Significant investments were made to increase productivity, so as to observe the delivery terms and fulfil the warranty requirements.

The Amsterdam subway project represented over 40% of the dragon’s turnover that year, and the whole consignment was managed by Mauro Quieti, a surveyor who joined Sisgeo in 1993 as a cad designer and product design consultant. Since then he has made considerable headway. He spoke French and Spanish, and Lamperti entrusted him with developing the related markets. It was Quieti who established relations with Soldata and set up the first meetings with Nicolas Poitrineau, the project manager at the French multinational operating on the Amsterdam subway, who in 2018 became general manager of Sisgeo France.

By the late 1990s, Sisgeo had become synonymous with quality; so 33

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

much so that, in 1999, the company signed a contract with Centro Iside, a temporary joint venture including Project Automation, a.k.a. the colossus Philips Automation. Centro Iside is still operational and is involved with numerous dams in Southern Italy and on the Italian islands. Sisgeo supplied and installed instrumentation for the technological adaptation of the monitoring systems of 14 dams managed

by Centro Iside in Campania, Molise, Puglia, Sicily and Sardinia. As with the Milan-Genoa high-speed line, Sisgeo did not just supply sensors; it over-saw their installation and the measurement of parameters, under the coordination of Valesini and the staff at Field.

Sisgeo was involved in the infrastructure works that contributed to making Italy one of the world’s most developed countries – but it also had to deal with less than admirable works. The major works for the construction of the bridge over the Strait of Messina was one example. The feasibility study began during Berlusconi’s time in power. Sisgeo came on board as a supplier of Fenice, once held by Turin’s Fiat, and then taken over by Electricité de France (EDF). Fenice won an important part of the contract studying the bridge’s impact on the local environment. There were numerous aspects to assess, and several investigation committees were set up to study social and environmental issues, the environmental impact on wildlife, methods for safeguarding slope stability and related monitoring activities. Hundreds of holes were drilled into the soil, in which pipes were installed featuring the same fixed inclinometers as those supplied by Sisgeo for the Amsterdam subway. The inclinometers, installed in a chain and connected to one another, monitored horizontal soil movements at different depths. The fixed inclinometer chains were connected with data acquisition units which, being equipped with a modern GSM system, transmitted the information to a processing centre which conducted real-time monitoring of the slopes’ stability. An enormous amount of work went into studying the areas to be affected by the future bridge. Of course, the bridge was never actually built, despite the significant financial resources invested.

Meanwhile, the Greeks took less than three years to build the Rio Antirio cable-stayed bridge, one of the longest suspended, multi-span bridges in the world. Spanning 2,250 meters across the Gulf of Patras, it connected Western Greece to the Peloponnese. It was built using funds earmarked for the Athens Olympics Games, having been declared a strategic piece of infrastructure, and was opened in 2004. It was constructed by a group 34

Chapter 3 - Back to Italy at high speed

of companies headed by the French Vinci. Located in an area of high seismic risk, it was designed to withstand magnitude 7 earthquakes on the Richter scale and wind gusts of up to 250 km per hour. Basically, it would remain standing even if one of its four pylons were to move by two meters. Sisgeo made a fleeting yet significant contribution to this project. Through the intervention of his friend Yorgos, Sisgeo instrumentation was used to carry out horizontal load tests on the foundation poles of the bridge’s pylons, prior to their installation.

This bridge, together with the galleries and viaducts of Egnatia Odos (the motorway that connects the port of Igoumenitsa on the Ionian Sea to the Turkish border, crossing the regions of Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace), was one of Greece’s last major projects before the national crisis. The Egnatia Odos motorway was built between 1999 and 2008, and Sisgeo, in close collaboration with Yorgos’ Eurotech, played a leading role in the supply of monitoring systems. Over the years, thousands of instruments were installed on the motorway line, some of which are still used today for monitoring.

35

CHAPTER

ONE-WAY TICKET TO SOUTH AMERICA

The journey that took Sisgeo to South America made a compulsory

stop in Spain, which in 2005 was experiencing an economic boom.

Since 1994, Spain had been enjoying the European Union’s highest growth rate and the country relied entirely on the construction of large infrastructure. Due to its collaboration with Pedro Romo’s Empirica, Sisgeo managed to secure a starring role in these works. It was Quieti who first contacted Pedro, with whom he established excellent relations. Pedro was a highly talented engineer with significant sales skills and an established name within Spanish companies. Pedro had a nose for business and his Empirica specialised in monitoring great works national-wide. Consequently, Sisgeo was called in for numerous rail and road projects in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville. The work pace was hectic, and required the utmost commitment. But the country’s extraordinary economic growth came to a sudden stop in 2008, when the financial markets’ instability and the start of the European debt crisis revealed Spain’s weaknesses. Major contracts stopped rolling in, and the following year the financial crisis hit, followed by the collapse of Spain’s industry.

Sisgeo was an indirect victim, but it soon bounced back. A work opportunity presented itself in Colombia, where Impregilo won the tender for the construction of a hydro-electric plant in Sogamoso, in the region of Boyacã. Taking part was tricky because the Italian giant, at the request of the Colombian government, required Sisgeo to set up a base in the country. In short, it was impossible to simply supply Impregilo with instrumentation, as had occurred for the Mazar dam in Ecuador. For Sisgeo, this was an interesting opportunity, but establishing an overseas branch required organisation, and there was no time to lose. Someone

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The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

needed to move to Colombia and follow the business’ incorporation and start up. However, nobody at Sisgeo was willing to accept such a task.

Partly because no one spoke good enough Spanish, and partly because Colombia was not exactly seen as a heaven on earth. Pedro Romo, who had no domestic orders due to the crisis, turned out to be the perfect man for the job. The Spaniards proved quite willing to move to South America; indeed, they had already been contemplating the idea, because of the works being conducted on the new canal in Panama, with the involvement of the Spanish Sacyr and the Italian Impregilo. Sisgeo seized this double opportunity and exploited the collaboration for both South American projects. Thus, Sisgeo and Field set up Monitoriza, a company with branches in Colombia and Panama, in collaboration with Pedro and his associates at Empirica, Juan Alcaide and Jesus Sainz.

In Colombia, the partnership laid the foundations for future contracts at the Quimbo El dam, in the heart of the Andes, on the Rio Magdalena, and at the Ituango dam, north of Medellin: acquiring those two large projects would have been impossible without a local company. Alcaide made an important contribution to the Columbian incorporation and start-up of Monitoriza, which was soon ready to handle the logistics and customs clearance of products, and the recruitment of personnel for the installation and operation of the instrumentation. The way into Panama had been paved for Sisgeo several years before, by Bruzzi and Lamperti’s Venezuelan friend Francisco Centeno. Lamperti met Centeno - a well-known and well connected geotechnical engineer who left Caracas to exploit the opportunities offered by Panama - during his numerous trips to Venezuela.

With Centeno’s help, Sisgeo won a contract to monitor the excavations for sewers across the historical city centre - an extremely important project for the reclamation of the bay of Panama. By setting up Monitoriza in Panama, and with Centeno’s collaboration, Sisgeo was able to apply for and win the contract to monitor the first line of the local subway.

Work on the new canal commenced, and Sisgeo was brought on board.

It was subsequently also involved with monitoring excavations of the cofferdams designed by Piero Sembenelli. Work was conducted to ensure the safety of a historic railway line potentially affected by the subsidence generated by the excavations. The instrumentation used was the latest version of the inclinometers installed in Amsterdam.

For some years, Bruzzi had been developing innovative inclinometers using MEMS sensors from the automotive industry. Sisgeo was among 38

Chapter 4 - One-way ticket to South America

the first companies to use them in the geotechnical field. MEMS, or Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, is the technology of microscopic mechanical, electrical and electronic devices integrated on the same silicon circuit. It was used for detection, processing or implementation purposes, rendering information collection and data transmission much more rapid. This innovation proved to be a winning move and today it is universally recognised and used by all major instrumentation manufacturers.

When relations between the Spanish at Sacyr and the Italians at Impregilo became strained, Impregilo left the Panama Canal project. At the same time, relations between the Spanish at Empirica and the Italians at Sisgeo and Field became complicated due to their diverging interests, and so their paths divided. Sisgeo had created greater links in Colombia, where Impregilo has been operational for some time, while Empirica believed more in the Panamanian market, where its compatriots were investing. Pedro and his associates keep Monitoriza in Panama, while Monitoriza in Colombia was taken over by Sisgeo, which later changed its name to Sisgeo Latino America. The company had its headquarters in Medellin and a base in Bogota, where the Bergamo geologist Carlo Vezzoli settled to follow work at the Hidro Sogamoso site.

In the 1990s, there was an endless toing and froing of Italian engineers in Altamira, Caracas, home to the headquarters of major Italian construction enterprises. The area housed the branches of Impregilo, Ghella and Astaldi, which were investing in Venezuela and were involved in the construction of much of the country’s major infrastructure (all this, of course, was before the rise of Chavez). Lamperti, frequently visited Altamira in those years, as Sisgeo supplied and installed hundreds of instruments during this time. Particularly noteworthy was the monitoring of the national railway lines that connected the capital Caracas and the states of Miranda, Aragua and Carabobo, across the Tuy valleys, thus linking the country’s various regions.

Trevi, too was well-established in the country. In addition to conducting specialist work on the subsoil, the company also worked in the oil industry. Trevi won a project to salvage the Bordeseco dam in the state of Merida, in western Venezuela. The dam’s conditions were unstable and numerous infiltrations were putting the infrastructure’s safety at risk. Its level was being maintained below minimum as a precautionary measure. Cement injections were required to waterproof the dam and 39

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

create diaphragm walls. Engineer Sembenelli, who was working for Trevi at the time, recommended monitoring interstitial pressure upstream and downstream of the diaphragm wall to monitor the infiltrations and soil conservation. For monitoring purposes, Sembenelli recommended using an instrument designed by Bruzzi during his time at ISMES, and subsequently produced and perfected by Sisgeo – a removable transducer for measuring interstitial pressure. The fact it was removable facilitated maintenance in the event of malfunction, without the need for new drilling. This was a useful feature for a monitoring plan spanning several decades. The customer was delighted with the instrument, giving Sisgeo the reputation as an innovative and reliable company. The contracting company decided to entrust the dragon with monitoring at the plant being built at the La Vueltosa dam, a few dozen km away from Bordeseco.

Geologist Gianfranco Iannaccone gave Sisgeo Latino America a boost when, in 2015, he moved, with his wife and two-year-old daughter, to Pablo Escobar’s city of Medellin, in Colombia, where he took the helm of the South American company. “Why did I choose to leave Italy and come here? Because I have always liked new adventures,” he said. “It was time for a new challenge. I had done a three-year stint in Sisgeo’s technical assistance, before climbing to the upper echelons of its subsidiary, Field, where I handled instrumentation and installation related services, as well as the collection of data detected by sensors.” Iannaccone had developed commercial and technical skills, having spent a considerable amount of time on the construction sites. “Sisgeo has the advantage of offering customers turnkey solutions rather than mere products. What drove me out here to South America was the fact that Europe’s large infrastructural works are dwindling, whereas in this part of the world there were still many new projects, especially dams, which were our speciality.” The geologist was referring to large projects in Colombia, such as the hydroelectric power plant at Ituango, a highly up-andcoming tourist area. Then there was the hydroelectric power plant at Cerro del Aguila, in Peru, which had seen the involvement first of Astaldi and then of Sisgeo. Also, in Peru, two bridges were being built – a suspended bridge at Hisgaura measuring over 140 meters in height, and a bridge at Pumarejo, over the Caribbean, measuring over 20 km. At the time, the most interesting market was Argentina, where, for example, five long tunnels were being built simultaneously under Buenos Aires.

A particularly interesting project was the Riachuelo Tunnel, built by 40

Chapter 4 - One-way ticket to South America

Salini-Impregilo, which runs under the city and was designed to purify the watercourses, polluted by the sewers. Other important works included Paseo del Bajo, a north-south road artery to facilitate entry into the capital and access to the port, and Soterramiento del Ferrocarril Sarmiento, an underground rail runnel designed to relieve traffic congestion in the capital.

“Our local presence had grown considerably. We had a network of distributors, representatives and technicians across the territory, from Guatemala to Costa Rica, from Peru to Brazil, and as far as Argentina.

This ensured an all-Italian presence and high quality products, as well as direct assistance through a large warehouse in Colombia,” continued Iannaccone. This made Sisgeo a strong competitor, especially because the US and Canadian companies simply distribute their products, without providing on-site assistance: “We had a team of fifteen people”.

Winning new projects stemmed from a careful training strategy, especially in subway and tunnel excavations: “While the local engineers were aware of the need to monitor hydroelectric works and bridges, the same could not be said for civil works involving railways and roads. Our work included raising awareness about this issue.” The same applied to Colombia, which was particularly subject to landslides. The cities here are often built on plateaus, up to two thousand meters above sea level, and the geological conditions are often unstable.

41

CHAPTER

NEW YEAR’S EVE 2007: THE TURNING POINT

Boston, autumn 2007. “When I turn sixty, I want to stop working

and devote myself to my hobbies: sailing and scuba diving.” This was a sentence that Domenico Bruzzi’s friends and colleagues had often heard him repeat - and Bruzzi was a man of his word. As his 60th birthday approached, the entrepreneur planned an exit strategy. Bruzzi decided to sell the company to an American, and he announced the sale during the International Symposium on Field Measurements in Geomechanics (FMGM), the industry’s most important conference, which in 2007 took place in Boston. Bottom’s up: Bruzzi toasted the sale of his shares in Sisgeo to Gary Durham. For Durham, this was an additional stake in the company, having acquired Slope Indicator several years before.

The plans to sell the Italian Sisgeo to Gary Durham began in mid2006. The negotiations and due diligence for the acquisition of Sisgeo proceeded smoothly. Lamperti travelled first to Atlanta, where Durham Geo was located, and then to Seattle, where Slope Indicator had its historic headquarters. Along with Geokon, the two companies, merged into Durham Geo Slope Indicator (DGSI), were undisputed industry leaders, with production sites in Atlanta and Seattle.

Gary considered moving part of the production business to Italy, being impressed by the country’s competitive manufacturing costs and high quality. In the year 2000, seven years previously, Sisgeo had moved its production and administration to a green field in Masate, in the outskirts of Milan, which is today an important industrial district. The facility was set up to provide instant solutions to customer requirements, ensuring high precision products with a rapid time to market.

But let us return to the end of 2007 when, before the Christmas holidays, Lamperti informed Sisgeo’s staff of the impending change in senior

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The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

management. He arranged with Gary to welcome in the New Year together and start writing a new star-spangled chapter in the history of Sisgeo. As promised, Bruzzi bowed out on the 31st of December.

However, in January, everything went wrong. Lamperti called Gary, but his phone rang out. He was not answering his emails either. Bruzzi was on holiday. Lamperti, who held the role of managing director with sales responsibilities within his purview, had no power to make vital decisions, either for himself or for the company, which in the meantime had grown to more than thirty employees. Lamperti pretended to have things under control and tried to buy time, but with no operational powers, it was extremely difficult to conduct business as normal. After ten long days, during which staff started getting worried and asking awkward questions, Lamperti managed to contact Bruzzi, who instantly understood how serious the situation was, and ended the deal with the defaulting Durham. The reasons for the latter’s disappearance lay in the imminent collapse of the Lehman Brothers and the crack down on credit

by American banks to most US companies - including Gary Durham’s.

Bruzzi never received the agreed sale price. Sixty-year-old Bruzzi was forced to postpone his final farewell. However, he appointed Romano Lamperti CEO of Sisgeo, giving him the broadest management powers, while remaining the company’s majority shareholder.

When Bruzzi took a step back from Sisgeo in 2007, he had to hand over the technical and production areas, until then managed alongside Enea Rossetti, who was also approaching retirement age. Rossetti was a close collaborator of Bruzzi’s. He had a background in electronics and physics, and a profound knowledge of sensors, developed first in ISMES, later in Sis Geotecnica and finally in Sisgeo. His role was to develop and implement Bruzzi’s innovative projects and ideas. After retirement, he was replaced by Marco Pellizzoni, who first joined the firm on trial, with a fixed term contract, in the summer of 2007. Pellizzoni was 41 years old, and his partner was expecting their second child: “A double leap into the void,” Pellizzoni later recalled. At the time, it looked like the group would be sold to the Americans, and Pellizzoni’s fear was that his experience in Sisgeo will be short-lived if the Americans moved production to the United States. During the days of great crisis and uncertainty that mark the start of 2008, Pellizzoni spoke to Lamperti, in search of certainties that the latter could not give. His permanent recruitment was postponed, only to be confirmed in mid-January 2008, when he was appointed manager of 44

Chapter 5 - New year’s eve 2007: the turning point

production: today, he manages about thirty engineers and workers.

Appointing Lamperti CEO was a leap in the dark. Already an expert in sales strategies, he now had to learn how to run a company, which involved patiently building relations with staff and taking on a leadership role. That was something the team at Sisgeo had no difficulty attributing to him. The company’s expansion strategy remained firm.

Sisgeo continued to pursue its foreign market development and internationalisation strategy. The second key role was entrusted to Mauro Quieti, now a majority shareholder in Sisgeo Asia Pacific, who was appointed international sales manager in 2008.

The first project in which Mauro Quieti proved his worth was the famous contract for the Amsterdam subway. Quieti was an experienced surveyor who had started collaborating with Sisgeo in 1993, due to his valuable competences managing Autocad in product design. Bruzzi was keen to have him at Sisgeo, and he was employed permanently as Lamperti’s sales assistant in 1996. “At the time, there were a dozen of us, and we all handled more than one role. As a result, I not only managed business in Italy, but in 1997 I also started dealing with Algeria, then France and Spain, partly because I spoke the languages.” Indeed, Quieti was convinced that it is easier to close a deal if you speak your customer’s language and show great regard for the local culture. At the head of international sales, Quieti focused much of the company’s efforts on South America, but he also scored a few agreements on German soil – something that is far from easy, given the presence of seasoned competitors. Quieti also understood the enormous potential offered by the Asian market and began to travel to Thailand and Vietnam. “Initially, I spent one week every two months in the Far East, visiting customers.

There were great handshakes and smiles all around, but when I left other competitors would come by, with just as many handshakes and smiles.“ While the Far East was fertile ground, it needed to be cultivated patiently and continuously. He spent 2012 travelling between Singapore and Bangkok, before deciding to open Sisgeo Asia Pacific in Thailand.

Quieti became its majority shareholder, with the remaining stake going to Sisgeo. “It was a profitable decision, as demonstrated by the exponential growth - in just a few months - in production destined to the Asian markets,” said Quieti.

Until 2015, all equipment had been imported from Italy, ready to be sold.

Then, it was decided to create an assembly line in Thailand, to ensure 45

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

Italian quality standards (and especially maximum sensor accuracy), and install components in the Far East, creating a reserve of stock and reducing delivery times and costs. “Moving assembly to Thailand allowed us to offer products tailored to our customers’ requests,” explained Quieti.

In 2016, the Asian subsidiary entered the busy Singapore market with a bang, winning orders for the city’s subway system, for the construction of the fifth terminal of the airport of Changi, and for the redevelopment of the military airport. Sisgeo was involved in underground galleries for hydraulic works. At the time, the Thai-Italian company had an 80% market share in Singapore. The second largest market was Thailand, where Sisgeo had its operational headquarters in a new building situated close to Bangkok’s city centre. “Five days after opening the local operating unit, I was called by the Royal Irrigation Department, the ministry that deals with dams and water courses. The government was interested in receiving a presentation of our company’s activities and thought we could contribute to the country’s development. Indeed, the ministry opened many doors for us so that we would help support the country’s growth.” The same can be said for the Department of Mineral Resources, which dealt with landslides through a country-wide prevention project: “Local players contacted us as we had become an important point of reference for the country”. Other rapidly developing countries where Sisgeo was making a name for itself included Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar (which had recently opened up to the world), and the small and poor country of Laos, where Thai companies were making major investments.

South Korea, remained a closed market, due to two local competitors, while China offered few opportunities, given that its major works were monitored using low-cost systems of dubious quality which were produced by local companies. India was a potentially interesting area, although component imports at the time were subject to 30% excise duties and trade was still difficult.

In 2015, Quieti started doing business in Australia, intensifying relations with Kim Malcolm, a former manager first at Slope Indicator and then at ITMSoil. Malcolm ran Geomotion, a distributor of products manufactured by the British ITMSoil, which was going through a hard time. To ensure continuity to his customers, Malcolm contacted Quieti and asked him to supply Sisgeo products. Quieti sensed the potential 46

Chapter 5 - New year’s eve 2007: the turning point

and started promoting Sisgeo on Australian turf. Once again, the largest hurdle was overcoming the mistrust of a market typically used to dealing with the Anglo-Americans, who had long reigned supreme.

Sisgeo’s high quality products, along with Quieti’s great dedication and Malcolm’s willingness to collaborate, soon bridged the gap.

Kim Malcolm approached Quieti with the idea of opening a Sisgeo branch in Australia. Lamperti jumped at the chance, as he had known Kim since the 1990s, and although they had long been competitors, he had always held him in high regard. Sisgeo Australia was born in January 2016. Today, Sisgeo is contributing to Australia’s leading subway and railway infrastructure works in Melbourne and Sydney, and the company intends to promote its presence in the mining industry, a business in which it developed considerable experience in Chile.

In 2016, Salini Impregilo, which had been based in Australia for some time, won a contract for the construction of a rail link between Perth and Perth airport. Field Sales Director and geologist Christian Iannacci was contacted by the Salini Impregilo managers with whom he had collaborated in drawing up the tender offer. It was a new opportunity for Field and Sisgeo, but the group needed a team capable of granting Salini Impregilo the entire monitoring package. Lamperti and Iannacci flew to Perth, and found valid support from Kim Malcolm and his Geomotion. A joint venture was set up between Field, Kim Malcolm’s Geomotion and the well-established local firm, Land Survey. The competition was fierce, but the joint venture won the contract and Sisgeo acquired the entire instrumentation supply. Matteo Bragallini, a Field geologist and project manager of the joint venture, seized the professional opportunity and relocated to Perth, confirming the Sisgeo group’s ability to take up new challenges in faraway lands and non-European cultures.

Mauro Quieti’s departure for Asia left North Africa and France uncovered - two strategic markets that required a profound knowledge of the local culture and the French language. With her fluent French, Francesca Belloni, who for many years had done back office work in Quieti’s sales department, proved equal to the task. Sisgeo’s sales assistants were mostly women who remained in the shadows, performing essential work conducive to winning contracts. Geotechnics, and monitoring in particular, were not areas in which women could easily stand out. But something was changing, as Belloni’s experience showed. Alongside Romano Lamperti, she took her first trips to Algeria, where Sisgeo had 47

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already followed other Italian firms, providing instrumentation for the dams at Beni Haroun, Kramis and Kerrada. Conducting business in Algeria was not easy without some local support to help with the endless red tape and to convince the Algerian ministries and institutions to purchase Sisgeo’s instrumentation. On one of their trips, Belloni and Lamperti contacted the Algerian engineer, Ramdane Abdelkafi. The meeting took place in the lobby of the Hilton hotel in Algiers, before Belloni and Lamperti’s return home. Ramdane made a great impression on both. He became their local contact and helped Belloni understand how to win the contract to monitor numerous public and semi-public works, including two dams built by the Chinese Draa Diss and Mahouane.

Algeria has continued to be a very interesting, high-potential market ever since, with Sisgeo involved in monitoring the Algiers subway and its high-speed railway line.

At the same time, Francesca Belloni plunged headlong into the complex French market, which showed little inclination to buy Italian instrumentation. The local agent had abandoned Sisgeo, and everyone seemed to have lost interest. Belloni started travelling to Paris and the Ile de France, and discovered huge opportunities linked to Grand Paris, a project to modernise the French capital so as to compete with cities of the calibre of London, New York and Tokyo. The plan was to turn Paris into an innovative capital within ten years, transforming the Ville Lumière into a megalopolis. Société du Grand Paris was the company responsible for allocating contracts, and it had a clear preference for francophone companies. Sisgeo started thinking about opening a subsidiary in France, to become an authoritative candidate - with an Italo-French pedigree - for monitoring the new subways, buildings and districts being built.

Belloni earned the respect of the influential director of Sixense Soldata, Martin Beth, and won an important contract supplying instrumentation for the Eole subway line, which runs through the centre of Paris, from La Défence to Nanterre, and is to become a strategic commercial hub.

Again in 2016, a determined Belloni took part in an industry trade fair, and touched base with the companies involved in the Lyon-Turin highspeed railway line. She managed to win the tunnel monitoring contract.

Subsequently, Sisgeo was chosen to install its instrumentation on the Frejus Road Tunnel, both on the French and the Italian side.

In just a few years, Francesca Belloni managed to put together a portfolio 48

Chapter 5 - New year’s eve 2007: the turning point

of forty customers and lay the foundations for the establishment of a French subsidiary, entrusted to Nicolas Poitrineau. These successes ushered in a new challenge for Belloni – to conquer the extreme lands of Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland, which had only partly been explored by the Sisgeo dragon.

In 2003, Quieti and Lamperti defied the Arctic ice of Iceland at the hydroelectric Karahnjukar dam, beating Soil Instruments - supported by local engineers - for the supply of instruments to Salini Impregilo.

The dam was remote, being situated an hour away from Reykjavik by air and more than two hours away by car, over the Icelandic plateau.

Here you arrived at a huge gorge, which today is barred by an imposing earth-filled dam. A series of tunnels connected the reservoir to a private hydroelectric power plant powering the world’s largest aluminium processing plant, owned by Alcoa and serving Europe and North America by ship. What made operations particularly complex was the fact that the instrumentation and data acquisition systems installed externally had to be adapted to work in the area’s prohibitive weather conditions, where the thermometer barely rises above freezing level during the winter months. This was a huge challenge for Sisgeo, made possible by its impressive technical skills.

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EMERGENCY: HERE COMES SISGEO

The whole of Italy learned of Sisgeo’s existence when, in 2012, the

company was called in to handle the delicate operations involving the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which had capsized off the coast of Isola del Giglio. Twenty Italian firms won the 400 million dollar contract to tow and scrap the Costa Concordia after the sad disaster at the hand of Captain Francesco Schettino. The group included large companies, such as Micoperi from Ravenna and Trevi from Cesena, and a dozen or so highly specialized small and micro companies - first and foremost, the Milanese Sisgeo, which had been entrusted with a particularly delicate task: that of ensuring that no mistake or unintentional movement, no matter how small, should make the wreck sink 80 metres under the sea, where any attempt at recovery would be impossible.

Sisgeo, through its subsidiary Field, installed a series of load cells.

These instruments automatically provided a web server with realtime information on the tension of the cables anchored to a platform on the seabed, whose job it was to keep the ship in position during the recovery operations. Sisgeo also supplied the displacement transducers installed on the platform, below sea level, which - like the cells provided information to ensure that the anchoring system would hold.

Fortunately, the Concordia was towed away smoothly, and the wreckage dismantled and scrapped, thanks to Italy’s first-rate engineering.

This was not the first time, either in Italy or abroad, that Sisgeo had to handle an emergency situation. The company was also involved with the tragic earthquake that hit Assisi in 1997. The dragon was called in to secure the tower of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which had collapsed following the seism. The project had to be carried out downstream, that is, when the damage was done. The Masate team was called in urgently by the Provincia Serafica di San Francesco, the monks who entrusted Sisgeo with laying the instrumentation required to keep the situation constantly monitored. This is because the micro-lesions 51

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

caused by the earthquake could continue to widen even long after the devastating event, and therefore had to be monitored carefully.

Bruzzi’s experience monitoring historical and ancient monuments, gained with ISMES, put Sisgeo in a leading position to safeguard artistic heritage and prevent dramatic events such as landslides and earthquakes. In terms of monuments, the Tower of Pisa, an international symbol of structural insecurity, provided Sisgeo with an opportunity for global visibility. Sisgeo provided the instrumentation to monitor the aquifer and the works to consolidate and stabilise the foundations on which the tower stands.

Since then, prestigious works such as the St Sophia Mosque in Istanbul, the Politeama Theatre in Palermo, the bell tower of the church of the Frari in Venice, the Paleochristian necropolis in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, the state-of-the-art Emerald Towers in Astana, Kazakhstan, and the Mart Museum of Contemporary Art in Rovereto, have been equipped with Sisgeo instruments. Sisgeo was also called in following an accident at the San José mines, in Chile, when in summer 2010 the Chilean government contacted Geosinergia - a company owned by Igor Bravo, a historic Sisgeo agent - to help rescue 33 miners trapped at a depth of 700 metres. The project, conducted by Geosinergia and Sisgeo, monitored subsidence while drilling out a conduit to take the miners food during the rescue operations. Sisgeo provided all the necessary equipment, and Igor and his team monitored works around the clock, checking for soil conservation during the excavations. The aim was to detect any suspicious movement, subsidence, crack or sudden and unpredicted event that could have impaired the recovery plan and the efforts to rescue the miners. The operation ended successfully on the 14th of October 2010, when all the miners were rescued. The contribution made by Sisgeo’s instrumentation was highly appreciated, especially by leading South American newspapers.

More recently, Sisgeo-Field was asked to monitor the basin of Genoa’s River Bisagno and its tributaries. Bureaucratic delays in implementing these works led to the river flooding, with tragic consequences.

Monitoring systems were only installed at a later date, when adjustment works were carried out. Sisgeo’s instrumentation and Field’s skills have proved extremely useful in preventing critical situations in a highly complex hydrogeological area, in the hope of avoiding future tragedies.

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I JUST WANTED TO TRAVEL

Vincenzo Caci joined Sisgeo in 2008 as a 33-year-old civil engineer. He

was thrilled to accept the job offer, fascinated by the idea of travelling and learning new languages - and Romano Lamperti was only too happy to oblige. Caci joined the company’s team of sales managers, and twenty days after his recruitment he was shipped to Turkey to resolve a major issue. For a series of reasons, Tamer Turesay, Sisgeo’s historic distributor in Turkey, had decided to terminate its agreement, despite scoring a considerable success. At that time, Sisgeo was in the running to provide instrumentation to the imposing Ermenek dam, in the province of Karaman: standing over 120-metres tall and 7 wide, to this day, the dam is a truly unique work in its kind. Instead, Turesay pulled out just a few months before the deal was clinched.

Caci, accompanied by the geologist Valesini, met with a former employee at Turesay, Ugor Tosya. Ugor was Sisgeo’s only hope of obtaining the Ermenek contract and maintaining Sisgeo’s presence in Turkey.

Turkish public contractors had a preference for local companies, and therefore, in just a few days, Sisgeo decided to establish Sisgeo Teknik.

The Turkish office was Sisgeo’s first experience of a foreign subsidiary, which was entrusted to Tosya. Business was booming, and Sisgeo took part in many invitations to tender to monitor most national dams, then under construction. However, after two years of collaboration, relations with Tosya became strained, and Sisgeo had to start afresh.

Round about this time, Gulcin Tezel asked Caci to step up their collaboration. Gulcin was a female employee at Zemin Etud, a company specialized in soil investigations and geotechnical design controlled by the Turkish giant Zetas. Zetas was owned by Professor Hilmi Durgunoğlu Turan, one of the world’s most eminent experts in the field of geology, as 53

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well as a former Sisgeo collaborator and an old acquaintance of Bruzzi’s from his days at ISMES. Having closed Sisgeo Teknik, in 2010 the red dragon decided to open Sisgeo Zemin, allowing the company to win a contract for the instrumentation and monitoring of the Bosphorus Bridge and of the tunnel running under this great waterway, built in 2012. The Bosphorus Bridge is unique in its kind, being the longest suspended cable-stayed bridge in the world. Indeed, it was the only possible bridge, given that the Bosphorus’ currents are so strong that reinforced concrete columns would not be able to withstand their force.

On that occasion, Sisgeo installed extensometers at a depth of 50 metres, something that had never been attempted before.

Unfortunately, political tension and local instability did not allow Sisgeo Zemin to put down roots, and after Gulcin resigned and left Durgunoğlu’s company, the local Sisgeo disintegrated in 2015. Three years on, the Turkish market continues to be an interesting yet very complex area: “When we first opened a local office here, there was talk of Turkey possibly entering Europe, offering European companies great opportunities to modernise the country. Today, the international scenario has changed, and after two attempts to establish a local branch, we have decided to supply the Turkish market from Italy,” explained Caci, which in addition to commuting between Milan and Ankara, has started scouring the Balkans, starting with Macedonia.

The way into these markets was offered by Zeljko Samardzic, a Serbian from Belgrade who Caci met at an industry trade fair in Barcelona. An Economics graduate, Zeljko’s degree did not allow him to escape the war. Zeljko, who struck up a close friendship with Lamperti and Caci, often tells the story of when he had to make ends meet in Belgrade, with his wife and two sons, earing just three Euro a day. It is thanks to him if Sisgeo managed to take part in one of the most complex renovation works involving six Macedonians dams built by the dictator Tito. The 1.2 million Euro contract, financed by the German Development Bank Hfw, was won by Sisgeo, which created and installed a system to automate and centralize the dam monitoring systems. Caci took the role of project manager, given the delicate nature of the works involved. Indeed, to install the necessary instruments, it was necessary to rely on a team of professional scuba divers who managed to reach the bottom of the dam.

This project allowed Sisgeo to obtain great visibility and gave the company an important reference in the rehabilitation and redevelopment of dams.

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Chapter 7 - I just wanted to travel

Zeljko later paved the way to participate in a call for tenders issued by the Technical University of Bucharest, Romania. The difficulty in this case was first and foremost bureaucratic. Zeljko prepared the entire documentation and Sisgeo won the supply of material to the scientific hub. Caci’s idea to cover the Balkans and Eastern Europe, two areas in a hurry to grow, were the first in a long series of excellent intuitions.

Indeed, in 2009 he decided to focus on Poland, after reading the daily newspaper La Repubblica, when he learned that the country was enjoying a period of growth and was ready to invest in new infrastructure. Caci contacted the local company Geod, took an airplane to Warsaw, and lay the foundations for a number of sales agreements that allowed Sisgeo to win contracts for the Warsaw subway in 2011. To this day, Poland is enjoying considerable economic expansion. The country continues to invest in great works, and therefore to be of great interest to Sisgeo.

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THE DRAGON CONQUERS THE REMOTE LAND OF SAINT HELENA

The Island of Saint Helena was one of the most difficult places in

the world to reach. Or at least it was until a few months ago, when an airport was opened connecting this tiny piece of land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to the rest of the planet. Before that, the island could only be reached onboard the mail ship RMS Saint Helena, the only link between the islands of the Atlantic and Cape Town until February 2018.

Not only did the ship dock once every three weeks, after a five to seven day journey; as the island had no real port, the ship would anchor out at sea, while the passengers were brought to land on small boats.

The island is a British Protectorate, and in March 2005 the British government decided to give the go-ahead for the construction of an airport, which was completed in 2016. Since 2017, therefore, a weekly flight connects Saint Helena to Johannesburg. Sisgeo won a contract at the airport after a young Economics graduate was thrown into the only continent yet uncovered by the little red dragon: Africa. His name is Lorenzo Magni. In January 2009, Magni was about to finish his Master’s Program in Management and Finance at New York University. This was the worst possible time for an aspiring stock broker. The financial crisis had hit rock bottom, and white-collar workers were forced to leave Wall Street with a cardboard box under their arm. The newspaper headlines spoke out about sub-prime mortgages, Lehman Brothers, and Barack Obama, the first black man at the head of the White House.

Magni returned to Italy in search of work in the country’s strong manufacturing industry, the world-renowned Made in Italy. Here he

57

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

happened to meet two Sisgeo managers, Vincenzo Caci and Gianfranco Iannaccone. They had overheard him speaking English in a restaurant one evening, and sensed he might have an interesting skill set. Sisgeo was on the lookout for staff capable of supporting its international growth, both commercially and in terms of developing new strategies for the company’s foreign subsidiaries and its entire network. Caci and Iannaccone introduced Magni to Lamperti, who felt the young man had potential and decided to open the doors to the company to him. Magni was placed under Quieti, with whom he soon took a real leap in the dark.

The American crisis was starting to trickle into Europe, and Sisgeo was seeking to leave the beaten track in search of new adventures - hence the decision to start exploring Africa. Magni scoured the market, emailing every South African geologist he could find. The first interesting reply came from Gerald Allan Davie, the owner of Geozone Geoservices. In early 2010, Gerald came to Italy to visit Sisgeo in Masate: he was a casuallydressed youngster with a rucksack slung on his back and long platinum blond hair. Gerald and Magni instantly hit it off, and after a few hours Sisgeo has signed an annual agreement for the distribution of Italian products in South Africa. A year later, the company got its first big break in South Africa, namely a risk mitigation project, in Afrikaans, involving the “Gautrain” rapid rail link between Johannesburg and Pretoria. This was a particularly complex job because the Johannesburg station had to be constantly monitored due to water infiltration. Moreover, the delivery times were very short and the media attention very high. This major project gave the Italian Sisgeo considerable visibility, and its name started to circulate. The following year, in 2012, various businesses contacted the Sisgeo-Geozone team asking them to submit an offer to monitor the construction of the airport on the Island of Saint Helena, known for having hosted the Napoleon during his exile. Sisgeo’s role was to supply sensors and provide monitoring services. The working conditions, however, were anything but great. The island did not even possess a military airport, and therefore the technicians and workers had to reach this remote strip of land using the few and painfully slow ferries available. Monitoring construction was indispensable because the island did not possess a natural runway, therefore it was necessary to dig out part of the mountain and use the material to build part of the runway embankment. Construction of the embankment instantly ran into problems due to soil settlement, subsidence and the material’s 58

Chapter 8 - The dragon conquers the remote land of Saint Helena

slipperiness. Moreover, there were technical difficulties in creating circuits of settlement sensor measuring over four hundred meters, well beyond the usual standard. These technical difficulties were resolved

by Sisgeo’s technicians, who spent several months on the island, cut off from the rest of the world. Today, also thanks to Sisgeo, what was once one of the most remote historical corners of the world is a little bit closer for anyone wishing to visit.

The project in Saint Helena and other experiences in Africa and other emerging countries allowed Sisgeo to branch out, no longer moving in the wake of Italy’s large contractors but establishing direct relations with foreign multinationals operating in infrastructure. Indeed, Sisgeo has worked on the Metolong dam in Lesotho alongside the Chinese Sinohydro, a world leader in the construction of dams and hydraulic works. It has also provided instrumentation for the Neckartal dam in Namibia, on behalf of the Italian Salini-Impregilo, which continues to maintain its leading role in major international contracts.

While Sisgeo was exploring the South African market, a new opportunity also opened up in Israel when Magni received a collaboration proposal from Tomer Karligano, who was then manager of the monitoring division of Gabi Shoef. At that time, the company for which Karligano worked actually handled non-destructive testing in the aerospace industry, but he intended to develop a new line of business in the geotechnical field, and was in search of a partner offering high-quality, competitivelypriced products.

Contracts soon started to roll in, and Sisgeo became involved in the construction of the high-speed railway line connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, working alongside Israel’s most important contractors. The dragon was then involved in restructuring the Heichal HaTarbut concert hall in Tel Aviv, home to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which opened in 1957 and was renovated in the course of the last decade. Karligano later set up his own business, with two other partners, and established Medidot Advanced Monitoring Technologies, now a leading company in the Israeli industry. Sisgeo started supplying instrumentation to monitor increasingly important projects, such as the expansion of the Port of Haifa and the construction of the Gilboa pumped-storage hydroelectric plant, the first of its kind ever to have been built in Israel.

The dragon also supplied instrumentation for the first subway line in Israel. There had been talk of building the Red Line for thirty years, 59

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

and in 2016 work finally commenced. Sisgeo has also been involved in projects involving two of the country’s most important cultural sites: the ancient City of David, near the Wailing Wall, and the Binyanei HaUma, home to the Jerusalem International Convention Center.

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FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

When the spotlight is turned onto the Olympic playing fields and

athletes, all the work carried out by the engineers, technicians and builders to erect the infrastructures is instantly forgotten. It is almost taken for granted. And yet, building the facilities for the Winter Olympics held in Sochi, Russia, in February 2014, was a true feat of engineering. Sochi, situated at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, overlooks the Black Sea and lies just a few kilometres away from the ski resorts of Krasnaja Poljana. Hemmed in between the mountains and the sea, the area is very popular with Russian holiday makers. However, it is also particularly subject to landslides, and therefore unsuitable for building any type of structure, never mind the stands and buildings required for the Olympic Games. The engineers came up with a flurry of piles, micropiles and tie-beam walls to cope with the land’s natural characteristics. The situation was so delicate that every construction had to be continuously monitored, and the Russian engineers sought a company capable of providing suitable equipment. The Russians first contacted Sisgeo through the distributor AGT Systems, in the person of Sergei Kharitonov, who at that time supplied Krasnodar’s Geoproekt with Sisgeo instrumentation. Sisgeo had already worked with AGT System on an area of Sakhalin Island that was rich in gas and oil deposits but particularly subject to landslides. On that occasion, Sisgeo had provided the instrumentation to monitor slope stability during the construction of the large Sakhalin II gas pipeline, a project worth several billions of dollars. The first Italians in Sochi were Lorenzo Magni and Giovanni Caloni, who inspected fifteen building sites in five days. These technical inspections, the purpose of which was to offer the Russian builders suggestions and solutions, were made on an old Lada Niva, possibly the only vehicle capable of tackling the area’s rough roads and their metre61

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

wide potholes. Having earned the Russians’ esteem, Caloni and Magni returned to Italy to arrange the supply of monitoring systems for some of the most important works related to the Olympic Games, including the Sochi ice rink, the Krasnaja Poljana cable cars, and the bobsleigh and tobogganing track. The installation work in Sochi was followed by two young Geoproekt geologists eager to make headway in this area, Alexey Gerelis and Alexander Bychikhin, who worked alongside Gpiko’s Viktor Sukhin and Vyacheslav Tarakanovskiy.

However, Sisgeo’s relations with Russia actually began a few years earlier. The first contacts date back to the time when environmental engineer Giovanni Caloni joined Sisgeo in 2002. He and Lamperti took part in Russia’s first industry trade fair in 2005. Caloni instantly realized that to enter the market it would be necessary to have a local point of contact, especially as at the time very few people spoke English. At the fair, Caloni met Viktor Sukhin of Gpiko, Sisgeo’s current distributor in Russia, specialised in monitoring buildings. Through Viktor, Sisgeo won a contract on one of Russia’s most important building sites, for the construction of the skyscraper known as Continental House. Through Gpiko, Sisgeo also supplied instrumentation to monitor the inclination of the modern Lakhta Center, a new multifunctional skyscraper in St Petersburg built to house the headquarters of the gas giant Gazprom.

Standing 462 metres tall, the skyscraper is the tallest building in Europe.

The number of hours of continuous concrete casting required to create its foundation broke the Guinness World Record.

Even back in the days of the Soviet Union, Russia had a highly developed monitoring culture, so much so that the Soviets consider themselves the inventors of the vibrating wire. In Russia, therefore, the instrumentation business originated from professionals working in the fields of geophysics and geology. In Kazakhstan, instead, where Sisgeo began to work five years ago, the Soviet engineering tradition had been long abandoned. Sisgeo was brought in by a small, far-sighted local company, BAYS LLP, to which it provided training and support, in an attempt to raise awareness on the importance of high-quality monitoring in areas affected by major infrastructure works.

The first projects in the country concerned small lots of great national value. One of the first contracts, for example, involved the construction of the National Library in Astana and then of the Museum of National History. Astana was a very young capital, established some fifteen 62

Chapter 9 - From Russia with love

years before at the behest of President Nursultan Äbişulı Nazarbaev, who wished to choose a central location for the country’s beating heart, away from the unstable border areas. In a short time, a number of ultramodern buildings were erected: government buildings, universities, libraries, and the National Theatre in Carrara marble. In many cases, Sisgeo handled the monitoring, teaching government agencies and local companies monitoring methods and approaches aimed at checking the quality and safety of the works.

The first projects kicked off in mid-2012, but with Expo 2017 Sisgeo started winning major orders for winter sports facilities, buildings, pavilions and new residential complexes, reflecting the nation’s modernisation and wealth. Expo 2017 Astana (the contracts for which were won in 2015 and 2016) was an important showcase for Sisgeo and its partners, who gained significant visibility and moved on to win the more recent monitoring projects in the oil & gas field.

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DREAMING OF AMERICA

Sisgeo has always been attracted to and at the same time fearful of

the United States. The continent is home to the company’s strongest competition, from Geokon to Slope Indicator and Canada’s emerging RST instruments, all of which master a market of great interest for Sisgeo and other European competitors. However, their attempts to make it in the US have often failed. The two continents have different customs and metrological standards - the United States use feet and pounds, while Europe uses metres and kilograms - and the regulatory framework is also very different. This results in duplicated production processes, different calibrations, countless certifications and complex product customizations. In addition, there is a certain amount of prejudice on the part of American engineers against anything that is not strictly made in the USA. For Sisgeo, adapting to all these specifications entailed a major investment with no guarantee of yielding suitable returns.

For all these reasons, the States remained a forbidden dream right up until 2014, when, during an international workshop organized by Sisgeo in Masate, Romano Lamperti and Lorenzo Magni were made an offer they couldn’t refuse: Pierre Gouvin, a former sales manager at Slope Indicator, suggested opening a Sisgeo branch in North America.

The three spent the following months discussing how to develop new business opportunities. Finally, Sisgeo found a legal solution that would allow the company to open a subsidiary in the United States while minimizing costs and risks. And so, in 2015, Sisgeo North America was born. The company was set up in Rhode Island, which was also home to Pierre Gouvin’s GeoInstruments.

Their shared enthusiasm in the enterprise, however, had to contend with two very different business philosophies, and the venture did not bring the desired results. Despite this failure, Magni’s frequent trips to North 65

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America gave Sisgeo the opportunity to gather important information on the US market. Specto Technology, owned by Edmund Kirby and Hai-Tien Yu, offered Sisgeo a concrete business opportunity, becoming the first company to market Sisgeo products under their own brand in the United States. Lamperti met Kirby at a conference in Mexico, and recommended him to Magni as a potentially interesting contact for promoting Sisgeo products in North America.

Later, thanks to the French Sixsense Soldata, Sisgeo managed to take part in the project for a light rail link being built in Maryland. In mid2017, the dragon was also given the chance to start negotiations for the extension of the Los Angeles subway’s purple line. During the first phase of construction, monitoring was entrusted to a local company, which took for granted that it would also be involved in the second part of the project. But Sisgeo was not about to sit back and watch: it took part in the invitation to tender, and Lorenzo Magni flew to Los Angeles to promote the benefits of its Italian equipment to local companies. Sisgeo managed to gain a place at the negotiation table with its competitors at RST, a rather feisty set of Canadians who, however, were unable to match the Italians’ competitiveness and quality standards. In February 2018, Sisgeo won the prestigious project monitoring the subway line that is to cross almost three miles of Beverly Hills neighbourhoods, with a station on the prestigious Rodeo Drive.

In the Geotechnics world, the news made front page: it was the first time an Italian company had managed to muscle in on a large-scale US project, until then the exclusive purview of North American companies.

The high quality of Sisgeo’s products undoubtedly played an important role in this success, but the fact of having a local presence finally tipped the balance. Because in an age of conference calls, human relations and being physically presence at meetings and negotiations is just as important as having technical staff on site and a service capable of supporting and responding to the customer’s needs.

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2018

Notwithstanding the extensive travel, the highs and lows, the countless

challenges, the effort to keep up with the latest technologies, looking back Sisgeo’s dragon cannot but rejoice in its 25 year history. 2017 was the best year ever: turnover hit a record high, registering EUR 9.7 million, up 20% compared to 2016. And the year 2018 seems to be confirming this position, in line with budget forecasts. Exports now account for 85% of production, and have more than doubled in the last ten years. What’s more, Sisgeo has grown in size too: with the latest round of recruitment, the Group can count on more than 120 employees, about 50% of which operate out of its headquarters in Masate.

In recent years, the number of companies specialising in the geotechnical manufacturing field has decreased, with some historic names having lost their edge and others having bowed off the stage. In the meantime, we have witnessed a proliferation of smaller companies, mostly from India, many from China and some from Korea, but these have not yet succeeded in earning an international reputation on a par with America’s and Europe’s market leaders.

Today, Sisgeo’s internationalization and specialization places the dragon right behind the world’s undisputed leaders, the American Geokon, the feisty and emerging Canadians at RST, and the Nova Metrics Group, which comprises the prestigious Slope Indicator, Roctest, Soil Instruments and Telemac, among others. Like Geokon, and unlike RST and Nova Metrix which have ended up in the hands of investment funds that do not always pursue an industrial approach, Sisgeo has remained firmly in the hands of Domenico Bruzzi and Romano Lamperti. Moreover, the company’s growth is not just marked by the new branches and offices opened around the world, but by the incorporation of other companies. Huggenberger, for example, is a Swiss company of international repute, known for the high quality of its products. It was set up in the Canton of Zurich in the early twentieth 67

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

century. It specializes in monitoring concrete dams, which abound in Switzerland, allowing Huggenberger to acquire a profound expertise and become an undisputed market leader in its sector. The brand’s longstanding history and the universal fame of its Telelot, an instrument that paved the way for the automatic measurement for plumb lines, make Huggenberger the Rolex of the geotechnical world.

During 2017, the company’s historical owners, Urs Marti and Edith Meier, faced with the lack of heirs interested in pursuing the business, decided to seek a buyer who would ensure a future for the company. When it came to the crunch, they contacted Lamperti, as they regarded Sisgeo as their ideal partner. This result was party down to Daniel Naterop’s presence in the Italian group. Naterop is a Dutch engineer who has long been living in Männedorf, near Zurich. For thirty years, he worked for Solexsperts, another company in the outskirts of Zurich, which operates in the monitoring and services field. Lamperti had long been trying to get him over onto his side. In 2013, Naterop finally accepted, and set down to developing Sisgeo’s presence in German-speaking countries.

As an internationally esteemed professional and a member of several international geotechnical committees, Naterop’s presence had an instant effect on Sisgeo’s reputation, and convinced Marti and Meier to consider the Italian company as a potential buyer of Huggenberger.

Negotiations got underway in the second half of 2017, along with a thorough due diligence process carried out by the consulting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and ended with the sale of the company in early 2018. Daniel Naterop became the its new Chief Executive Officer, while Urs Marti and Edith Meier agreed to continue collaborating with Huggenberger, to ensure business continuity and a smooth handover to the Italian team.

The acquisition of a highly profitable company such as Huggenberger will allow Sisgeo to exploit commercial, technical and production synergies.

While Huggenberger exports its products worldwide, Sisgeo hopes to express its full commercial potential through a more incisive and widespread product distribution. In technical and production terms, Huggenberger’s experience and mechanical equipment will make it possible to test new prototypes, turning the company into Sisgeo’s experimental centre.

Sisgeo’s electronic innovations and advanced technology, instead, will be applied to Huggenberger’s more traditional equipment.

The acquisition forms part of a project, launched in 2015, to promote 68

Chapter 11 - 2018

the group’s growth and rationalisation, and to optimize its internal organizational processes. This is being achieved with the involvement of the international consulting company Pricewaterhouse Coopers. On the commercial side, after years of growth, Sisgeo is hoping to consolidate its position, gaining new market shares and increasing its workforce yet further. This vision is warmly supported by Vincenzo Caci, who, while maintaining a direct interest in the Middle East and the Balkans, is convinced of the need to follow the consolidation route, gaining a position of absolute leadership in Europe and penetrating those areas with a high strategic potential, including Germany, Northern Europe, France and Africa. To this end, in early 2018 Sisgeo opened a French branch - currently run by Nicolas Poitrineau - entrusted with the task of winning orders for the Grand Paris project, which includes some of the world’s most important infrastructure works and looks set to change the face of Paris over the next ten years. The way forward has been mapped out by Poitrineau’s long-standing experience and his profound knowledge of the French market, but also by the work conducted previously by Francesca Belloni.

Today, the mind behind the research and development department at Masate is Emilio Pozzi, a computer engineer specialized in industrial automation. His work group is made up of five internal researchers plus the team at Next Industries, a company established by Sisgeo in 2014 and currently run by engineer Massimiliano Bellino. Bellino used to run his own business, supplying hardware and software to Sisgeo. He also contributed, in collaboration with Pozzi, to designing and developing Omnialog, a datalogger that pools together and processes the information collected by sensors. The aim of Sisgeo’s R&D is to work both on process innovation, so as to speed up production, and on product innovation, keeping in step with recent scientific discoveries that focus both on product digitization and on the wireless and fiber optic connection of sensors and dataloggers. To this end, Sisgeo has kicked off a new project to create a scientific observatory of innovation in collaboration with major Italian and foreign universities, professional associations and research centres, so as to keep continuously abreast of the latest developments.

Sisgeo already partners the Politecnico di Milano, the University of Parma and the Swiss University of Rapperswil, near Zurich.

Increasing ambitions and ever more complex challenges require a strategic leap and a sound investment in planning. This message, shared 69

The Adventurous Quest of the Red Dragon

by Lamperti, was introduced by Lorenzo Magni, who has drafted a strategic plan to help the company grow and express its full potential going forward. For Sisgeo, this means creating a clear, well-defined model covering several areas: internationalization, hitherto entrusted solely to the expertise of individual managers; financial reorganization; boosting innovation; and the optimization and automation of the entire supply chain, investing in IT processes, hardware and software so as to keep the entire production line, stocks and production times under control.

At the Group-wide strategic level, therefore, there is still plenty of work to be done. Because these last 25 years are just the beginning, as Sisgeo sets out to conquer world leadership in its sector.

70

AFTERWORD This book would not exist without the contribution of Gloria Riva, a journalist at La Repubblica, who first wrote about Sisgeo in February 2013 in the daily’s financial supplement, Affari&Finanza. The article covered the dismantling of the Costa Concordia, in which Sisgeo - a dwarf amongst giants - was described as fundamental to the success of the operations. Gloria Riva is a financial journalist and part of the investigative reporting team at L’Espresso, which handled the Falciani List, the Malta Files, the Bahamas Leaks and the Paradise Papers. With L’Espresso and all the journalists of the American ICIJ consortium, Gloria Riva won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 2017.

Romano Lamperti contacted her in early 2018 to expound his project of retracing Sisgeo’s history in a book, describing the dramatic turns of events, the highlights and the major crises faced by the company, each of which was overcome through the passion and professionalism of Lamperti’s team.

Lamperti recalls how the story quickly took shape, enriched by the journalist’s interviews with Sisgeo’s managers, who provided plenty of details and ideas. Although it is the journalist who wrote the backbone of the text, she has chosen not to put her name on the cover, because the stories told in this volume belong to Sisgeo and its collaborators, and especially to Romano Lamperti, whose brainchild this book is.

73

THE RED DRAGON EVOLUTION Employees number

58

9,72 ML

Turnover in Euro 7,29 ML

43

5,98 ML

37

14

17

2,99 ML 1,12 ML

1993

1999

2007

2013

2017

SISGEO GROUP

ITALY

ITALY

SWITZERLAND

BRANCH

FRANCE

COLOMBIA

AUSTRALIA

THAILAND

FMS

FIELD France

FIELD Slovakja

AUSTRALIA

FRANCE

SLOVAKIA

FIELD MONITORING SERVICE

BRANCH

BRANCH

Updated to the 30th of June 2018

1984, MENTA DAM, Cesare Colombo, Romano Lamperti

1985, ARGENTINA, Cesare Colombo visit to Inteca

1983, LAUSANNE, Domenico Bruzzi, Piero Sembenelli

1985, CAORSO NPP, Liquid Level Meters DAG-100

1984, ICSMFE meeting, Domenico Bruzzi, John Dunnicliff

1985, GARDA LAKE, Domenico Bruzzi, Michele Jamiolkowski

1986, VALTELLINA, Roberto Riccioni, Domenico Bruzzi, Gualtiero Baldi

1988, The RED BOOK, John Dunnicliff

PIEZOMETRO CASAGRANDE, Boston Society of Civil Engineers, Arthur Casagrande

1993, BERGAMO, ISMES Laboratories, Domenico Bruzzi, Enea Rossetti

1993, WLI, first order paid by check

1994, ATHENS, Romano Lamperti, Tony Simmonds

1994, LEBANON USA, Letter of Tony Simmonds

1995, LEBANON USA, Geokon headquarters, Barrie Sellers, Domenico Bruzzi

1994, SEGRATE, Profiler assembly, Luciano Rodini

1993, SEGRATE, Inclinometer calibration, Gianni Montanelli

1994, THAILAND, In-place inclinometer installation

1994, SEGRATE, Paolo Valesini

1995, GREECE, Evinos Dam, Romano Lamperti, Yorgos Hadjiyannelis

1998, GREECE, Evinos Dam

1995, LONDON, Richard Bassett, Romano Lamperti

1999, IRAN, Izadkhast Dam, Romano Lamperti, Habib Reaisi

2000, Kim Malcolm, Giorgio Pezzetti

2000, VENEZUELA, Contuy Medio construction site, Romano Lamperti, Saverio Testamark

2001, ATHENS, Alessandro Zampieri

2002, AMSTERDAM, Metro construction site, Nicolas Poitrineau

2002, LISBON, Luis Carlos Tolda de Abreu

2002, LISBON, Metro station of Terreiro do Paรงo, Romano Lamperti

2002, IRAN, leaflet Sisgeo-Sadafzar

2002, DAMASCUS, Romano Lamperti

2003, MASATE, Visit of Iranian delegation, Romano Lamperti, Domenico Bruzzi

2003, PAKISTAN, Bodyguards

2003, PAKISTAN, Romano Lamperti

2004, TEHERAN, Piero Sembenelli, Romano Lamperti

2004, TEHRAN, Romano Lamperti

2004, TEHRAN, Piero Sembenelli, Shahab Attaie

2004, MODENA, Construction site of High-Speed Railway MI-BO, Gianfranco Iannaccone

2003, ICELAND, Kárahnjúkar dam, Mauro Quietii

2004, ICELAND, On the road to Kárahnjúkar, Romano Lamperti

2004, CARACAS, “Asamblea Nacional”, Romano Lamperti

2004, VENEZUELA, Bordeseco dam, Romano Lamperti

2004, ISTANBUL, Santa Sofia (Ayasofya), Tamer Turesay, Paolo Valesini

2005, SEDRUN, Gotthard tunnel, Daniel Naterop

2005, VENEZUELA, la Vueltosa dam, Ruben Luna, Romano Lamperti and Desurca staff

2005, MASHHAD IRAN, Romano Lamperti, Mahmood Golabchi

2005, MOSCOW, GeoFORM exhibition, Romano Lamperti, Viktor Sukhin

2006, SAUDI ARABIA, Mahmoud Fardous, Romano Lamperti

2006, SAUDI ARABIA, Itwad dam, Mahmoud Fardous

2006, IRAN, Tangab dam, Romano Lamperti

2006, OMAN, Wadi Dayka dam, Paolo Merlanti, Mahmoud Fardous, Romano Lamperti

2006, GREECE, Egnatia Odos, Yorgos Hadjiyannelis, Emilio Pozzi

2006, UKRAINE, Kharkiv University, Romano Lamperti

2006, PORTO CARRAS Greece, Daniel Naterop, Romano Lamperti

2006, GREECE, Egnatia Odos, Yorgos Hadjiyannelis, Romano Lamperti

2007, ATLANTA, DGSI Headquarter, Simon Cornwallace, Romano Lamperti

2007, ATLANTA, Gary Durham

2007, NEWPORT, Romano Lamperti, Domenico Bruzzi

2007, RIYADH, Ministry of Municipality, Romano Lamperti

2008, SYRIA, Dreikich dam construction site, Romano Lamperti

2008, CAMPOGALLIANO, High-Speed Railway MI-BO, technical visit of Sisgeo staff

2008, High-Speed Railway MI-BO, Modena Viaduct, Vincenzo Caci, Barbara Frontini

2008, MOSCOW, Vasili Sokolov, Giovanni Caloni, Vyacheslav Tarakanovskiy

2009, ALEPPO, Romano Lamperti, Abdo Hayrabedian, Giovanni Caloni

2009, IRAN, Namrood dam, Shahab Attaie

2010, PANAMA, Panama New Channel, Gianfranco Iannaccone

2010, CHILE, San Josè mine, Igor Bravo

2010, CHILE, San Josè mine, working technicians

2010, SOCHI, Alexey Gerelis, Lorenzo Magni, Sergey Kharitonov

2010, SOCHI, Sergey Kharitonov, Lorenzo Magni, Giovanni Caloni, Alexey Gerelis

2011, SOCHI, Lorenzo Magni, Giovanni Caloni

2011, BOLOGNA, High-Speed Railway station, Stefano Ciufegni, Alessandro Zampieri

2011, PERU’, Huanza hydroelectric plant, Vincenzo Caci, Gianfranco Iannaccone

2011, PANAMA, Francisco Centeno Pulido

2012, PANAMA, Underground line 1, Pedro Romo Alcañiz

2012, SOUTH AFRICA, Johannesburg-Pretoria railway “Gautrain”, Lorenzo Magni

2012, GIGLIO ISLAND, Costa Concordia shipwreck

2013, GIGLIO ISLAND, Sisgeo datalogger

2013, COSTA CONCORDIA, “La Repubblica” article, Gloria Riva

2013-17, ISTANBUL, Third Bosphorus bridge

2013-17, ISTANBUL, Third Bosphorus bridge, IPI installation

2013, MILANO, Underground line MM5, Alessandro Zampieri

2014, COLOMBIA, El Quimbo dam, Juan Alcaide Alonso, German Expósito Vélez, Gianfranco Iannaccone

2014, ASTANA, National Library, Alberto Buonamano, Lorenzo Magni, Luca Besana

2013, TEHERAN, Romano Lamperti, Shahab Attaie

2015, ROME, Metro Line C, Emilio Pozzi

2015, ROME, Metro Line C, Hystorical buildings monitoring

2015, PERU’, Cerro del Aguila dam, Carlo Vezzoli

2014, OSLO, NGI Headquarter, Daniel Naterop, Elmo Di Biagio, Romano Lamperti

2015, BANGKOK, Sukhumvit Soi 39, inclinometer measurements, Mauro Quieti

2015, COLOMBIA, Sogamoso HP dam, Gianfranco Iannaccone, Romano Lamperti

2016, SAINT MARTIN LA PORTE, Tunnel EURALPIN Lyon-Turin, Osvaldo Zedda

2016, MALAYSIA, Ulu Jelai Dam, Massimo Bugliosi, Alessandro Uttaro, Mauro Quieti

2016, QATAR, Doha Metro, Nicolas Poitrineau and Soldata staff

2017, F.I.R.O.M., Konsko dam, Željko Samardžić, Vincenzo Caci

2017, WARSAW, Station C18 Warsaw Metro, Vincenzo Caci

2017, WARSAW, Warsaw Metro construction site

2017, SAINT MARTIN LA PORTE, EURALPIN construction site, Francesca Belloni, Osvaldo Zedda

2018, SANT HELENA ISLAND, New airport

2018, PERTH WA, Matteo Bragallini, Damiano Frontini 2018

2018, HORGEN SWITZERLAND Huggenberger Headquarter, Daniel Naterop, Edith Meier, Urs Marti

Printed on behalf of Sisgeo S.r.l.

by Tipografia Litografia A. Scotti S.r.l Via E. Berlinguer, 6 - Cornate d’Adda (MB) First edition - 2018

When a project is conducted with passion, the journey towards the end goal becomes an exciting adventure. And at Sisgeo, a company in the suburbs of Milan, passion is everything. “How the dragon conquered the subsoil” retraces the main stages of Sisgeo’s growth. It is a story of industry and passion, recounting the hard work of the company’s founders and of the managers, employees and collaborators who, over twenty-five years, have allowed the company to refine the design, production and sale - not to mention the culture - of instrumentation in the field of geotechnical and structural engineering. Its products have the most diverse applications, including the monitoring of dams, tunnels, buildings, bridges, viaducts, excavations and underground works. Over a quarter of a century, Sisgeo, established in 1993 and based in Masate, Milan, has conquered a large share of the international market, becoming a world leader in its field, with branches and subsidiaries in strategic locations throughout Europe, Asia, South America and Australia.

Sisgeo’s advanced, all-Italian instrumentation benefits from the expertise of a united and highly motivated team, capable of rising to the latest challenge by applying innovation, know-how, cutting-edge design and a profound knowledge of civil engineering and instrumentation applied to geology.